What Protest Votes Do--today's LA Times

[CaliforniaPeggy]

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is very well-written and worth reading.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-weinstein-humphrey-nixon-election-20161021-snap-story.html


By Henry Weinstein

When I stepped into the polling booth on Nov. 5, 1968, to cast my first vote for president, I was an angry Berkeley law student active in a variety of causes, including the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and endeavors to enable California farmworkers to unionize.

I did not like either of the major candidates. Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, promised to bring an unholy version of “law and order” to our country, just as Republican candidate Donald Trump is hawking now.

I also had no enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey. Until he became vice president under Lyndon Johnson, I admired Humphrey, the Minnesota senator who had championed civil rights. But Triple H morphed into Johnson's surrogate, supporting an unwise, immoral war in Vietnam.
Those of us who helped Nixon win by failing to support the better candidate acted as if voting in a presidential election was a simple matter of morality.

A devastating Bill Mauldin cartoon crystallized my feelings about Humphrey’s noxious role. It depicted Humphrey speaking to a Vietnamese woman seeking shelter from American bombs in foxhole. The caption: “Ma'am, I represent The Great Society.”

My hostility to Humphrey intensified during the Democratic convention when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's gendarmes beat demonstrators with truncheons on city streets, prompting Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff to blast the police's “Gestapo” tactics in a speech from the convention podium. In response, Daley, a Humphrey backer, brandished his middle finger.

[ailsagirl]

2. Excellent-- thanks for posting, CaliforniaPeggy!!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. I appreciate your kind comment, my dear ailsagirl! It was my pleasure to share this.

[Hekate]

4. Thanks, CalPeggy. I also came of age in 1968 in California...

I worked hard for Senator Gene McCarthy, and the losses by violence that year were devastating. I was quite set to vote for Hubert Humphrey, but I transferred a university in another state and could not get my ballot.

I've never quite understood the impulse to make a protest vote. I feel like 1968 I was baptized and confirmed in the Democratic Party, and for all its human flaws, when I looked around at Richard Nixon, Gov. George Wallace, and all the rest on the other side -- as well as their party platform -- there was simply no abiding what the GOP had to offer. Not then, not now, not ever.

I was just reminded of what we lived through in the 1960s-70s by reading Tom Hayden's obit in the LA Times. Now there was a man who never gave up.

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. As clear a case as any to be made against plurality voting in multi-candidate elections. Seems

to me it's well past time to address this!

[HughBeaumont]

7. Lost in all of this is the fact . . . .

. . . that Stein and Johnson are horrible alternatives.

Stein is a panderer who offers no legitimate solutions or plans that would work within the bounds of a governmental acumen.

Johnson is more economically extreme right wing than Trump. And he's a Libertarian . . . whose idea of "political balance" is "constantly attacking Democrats and giving Republicans and Corporations a free pass each and every time". So fuck that.

[Gothmog]

8. A vote for stein or Johnson is a vote for trump

[LWolf]

9. Well, no.

You're not preaching to the choir, you're preaching to the choir and those Democrats and others left of center who are silenced by the TOS.

DISCLAIMER: RESPONDING TO THIS OP IS NOT ADVOCATING OR SUPPORTING THIRD PARTY VOTES, OR ANY VOTE THAT DOES NOT HELP DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP, AND MY RESPONSE IS NOT ABOUT THIS ELECTION, BUT ABOUT PROTEST VOTES IN GENERAL.

I have voted for candidates that were not my original choice, but were acceptable; I have voted for the lesser evil, and I have also cast protest votes. I can tell you that I've generally been more satisfied with protest votes, because I felt I was allowing my actual voice, not the pretend voice mandated by partisan bullies, to be heard.

The results of voting for lesser evils? 1. The change you want to see never happens, and the country continues to evolve down the wrong road. 2. The wrong road is legitimized. 3. When you, as all those partisan bullies told you to do ("Be an activist AFTER they win!!!!) try to act for change and oppose those policies you never supported, the partisan bullies suddenly say, "You haven't given him enough time." Or, "Well, he got elected by a majority. This is what the majority wants." Which is, of course, exactly NOT what all those lesser evil voters who allowed partisan bullies to line them up and march them to the voting booth to vote as instructed told them at the time.

Advocating lesser evil votes is advocating for the two party system that does not adequately represent the 99%.

Every single election cycle is full of fear-mongering bullies who, out of fear and hatred of "the other," encourage lesser evil votes. The current election? I think more lesser evil votes are being cast on both sides than ever before. It has little to do with what people want, but what they DON'T want.

I think we'd be a hell of a lot healthier as a voting democratic republic if we vote FOR what we wanted rather than against what we don't want, and if we didn't allow media talking heads and partisan bullies tell us what and how to think and vote. And if those in power really cared about democracy, they'd take the money influence out of the process and open it up with proportional representation or a form of IRV or both.

But that's just me.

And, as far as the article goes? I remember Nixon quite well. I didn't like him, didn't support him, and I knew he WAS a crook. And guess what? He was still more liberal in many ways than the Democrats we've been electing ever since, which points to #1 above.