It was the year 2000, and the U.S. presidential election campaign was in full swing. As a young voter, I felt that the two major parties represented everything that was wrong with our political system: gridlock, corruption, erosion of individual liberty, and on and on and on… Of course, now, many years later, I still believe all those things! In fact, I feel the years since that fateful election have only exacerbated what’s bad about the way our government goes about its business. This feeling about political parties, as on point as it may be (after all, it's shared by none other than the top dog of the Founding Fathers himself, George Washington), nevertheless led me to the worst voting mistake I ever made: I voted for a third party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.
Maybe I voted for Ralph Nader. It might have been Harry Browne. Perhaps it was someone else entirely. Maybe I wrote my own name in! I’m really not quite sure. At the time, I was simply so turned off by the two major parties that I couldn't bring myself to vote for either one of their candidates.
If there had been no choice other than the two major party candidates, I knew for sure I would have voted for Al Gore, the Democratic nominee. He was Bill Clinton’s vice president, and the country was just coming off what could be considered a successful two terms by Clinton. The economy had bounced back rather nicely from a recession that had started under the previous president's watch, which happened to be the father of George W. Bush, the Republican nominee. There seemed to be little reason not to support Clinton’s hand-picked successor. But damn those major parties, I thought! Oh, by the way… did I mention I was voting in Florida? Not exactly an insignificant bit of trivia, as I would soon come to learn!
Election Day 2000. Al Gore won the popular vote nationally. But the Electoral College vote, which is what actually determines who wins, came down to Florida. George W. Bush had a small lead in the state, small enough to trigger an automatic recount. Did I mention...? Oh yes. Yes I did. So there we were. Florida was at the center of an unresolved presidential election! It all dragged on with no end in sight. Recounts and more recounts. And then more recounts still! Overvotes. Undervotes. Hanging chads! Each recount seemed to chip away more and more at George W. Bush’s lead. But then the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the recounts were suspended, and Bush was officially declared the winner.
I couldn’t help but feel guilty about all this. After all, I would have voted for Al Gore. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 might still have happened, but we would have almost surely avoided a largely pointless war in Iraq. We would have had a president addressing the climate change problem much earlier on. We might have even avoided the sequence of events that led us into the Great Recession.
But thanks in part to my stupid protest vote, Al Gore didn’t get elected. So what did I learn? Well, I didn’t learn that our political party system sucks, because I already knew that! But I did learn that when the system is as badly damaged as ours is, the only effective way to change it is in dramatic fashion, not through protest votes for candidates who have no chance of winning! Perhaps instead we need something like a Constitutional amendment that severely restricts the influence of political parties in our government. Until something like that happens, though, I vowed that I would never again vote for a third party candidate for president; I would always vote for one of the two major political party candidates. After all, I don't want to be indirectly responsible for helping to elect a president that is totally unfit to lead!
