Life's a Risk
columnist: Jeff Wrobel

Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Libertarians: Stop Voting Absentee

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By voting absentee, libertarians are throwing their votes away.

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by Jeff Wrobel
(libertarian)
Sunday, March 9, 2008

Over the past 28 years I believe that I've voted for every single Libertarian on my ballots. Not one of those people has ever come anywhere close to winning. I long ago gave up hope that my candidates would win. The reason I vote for them is to make a statement. I never vote for the lesser of two evils because that person will claim, and may even believe, that I support him.

Unfortunately, even my little tiny statement is no longer getting heard. The main reason is that I've been voting absentee.

Voting on an absentee ballot used to be a clever strategy for amplifying the statement of your tiny vote. Three decades ago most registrars of voters began counting votes before Election Day. They would rip open each absentee ballot as it arrived and add it to the results. At the beginning of Election Day, sometimes even before polls opened, they would begin reporting the current tally. Originally, since a large plurality of absentee voters were traveling businessmen, and since the Republicans used to be the party of the small businessman, the early returns usually favored the Republican Party.

The most highly educated and intelligent block of the voters -- the libertarians -- saw what was happening and realized that they could use this to their advantage. Word spread that every libertarian should vote by absentee ballot so that the early election returns would show every Libertarian with a higher level of support than he actually had. In those days many registrars of voters required a valid reason to vote absentee. The statute of limitations has probably run out on lying to the government in the 80's, so I can tell you now that I always happened to be called out of the country around election time.

I'm not sure if the strategy of voting absentee ever resulted in swaying an election to a libertarian or not, but I do believe that it made more than a few people start considering the possibility that it was reasonable to vote for someone other than a Democrat or Republican. The biggest effect I ever witnessed was in 1992 when Andre Marrou won Dixville Notch; the tiny New Hampshire town that is famous for being the first place to vote in the nation. A clever libertarian had purchased subscriptions to Reason Magazine about a year before the election for every resident of Dixville Notch, giving them a chance to hear and consider the arguments for freedom. On Election Day, for a few wonderful hours, Marrou was winning the election for President. For those few hours everyone in the country was asking, "Who are these libertarians?"

But then things changed. People started complaining about early announcements of results. They argued that if people who planned to vote in the evening found out that certain elections were already decided, they'd stay home. They argued that by reporting results before the polls closed, the media were influencing the election. I guess that's in contrast to today where the media are completely unbiased and have no influence on elections. Right.

Of course it's actually a great thing when people who haven't studied the issues and don't really care too much about the election decide to stay home from the polls. I don't need my well-reasoned, principled vote cancelled out 100 times over by people who are voting based on the looks of a candidate, their own self-interest, or because a candidate's last name sounds solidly Caucasian.

But the average corporatist, racist, power-hungry, arrogant, uneducated politician would have to work really hard to get elected in a world like that. So the situation had to be "fixed". Various justifications for withholding election results were proffered: We don't want to discourage people from voting. The bandwagon effect had to be avoided (virtually the opposite argument to the discouragement argument). False reporting could convince people to vote differently. Et cetera. The end result is that we the people don't get to know any results until the government and corporate media decide to tell us.

A side effect of this is that absentee ballots are not counted right away. Counting these ballots requires manpower, which of course costs money. Registrars of voters decided that, as long as they weren't allowed to give the results ahead of time anyway, there was no need to expend the labor counting absentee ballots. Many of them won't even open up the absentee ballots unless there's a mathematical chance that they could affect at least one race.

Months before Tsunami Tuesday I gave up my nearly life-long registration in the Libertarian Party in order to vote for the great Ron Paul in the Republican primary in California. I asked for an absentee ballot, which I received about 3 weeks before Election Day. I mailed it back the next day, feeling a great deal of satisfaction. Well, one week after Election Day my registrar of voters reported that they still hadn't gotten around to counting 160,000 absentee ballots. One month afterwards, they still had 23,000 absentee ballots left to count. Finally, more than 5 weeks after the election, the site reports that they're done counting.

Assuming that they ever really did finally get around to counting my ballot, it is far, far too late for my puny little voice to be heard. Not a person on the planet cares any more about the California primary election results -- not even me. When I wanted my voice to be heard was on Election Night. I wanted the major networks' pie charts to include my vote.

There are a few other reasons to vote absentee: It's more convenient, it's more certain that you'll actually vote (suppose you get sick on Election Day), it's less prone to mistakes, and in many parts of the country you have a paper trail to prove you voted (as opposed to pushing buttons on a Diebold machine). But when you're voting for a candidate that you're pretty sure is going to lose anyway, none of these things matter nearly as much as having your vote counted on Election Night.

I urge every libertarian to stop voting absentee. The rest of you should definitely vote absentee.

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©2008 Jeff Wrobel, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Sunday, March 9, 2008
Last modified: Sunday, March 9, 2008

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