This is the Minute Microscopy that needs a little more than a minute…

This happens every four years.

A political reality-show begins to air on the news each night, with several people throwing their name in the hat for the presidency of the United States of America. And the primaries serve to narrow down the race to two, often abysmally underwhelming choices – always from the same two parties, because this is the only developed country that has themselves convinced there are only two ways to think about things.

It’s not that there aren’t more than two parties to choose from, it’s just that everyone has been brainwashed into thinking they could never win. As if there isn’t ample evidence to the contrary in numerous countries around the world. And it is most certainly brainwashing. It’s a rhetoric we all repeat, contribute to, and perpetuate with the most intense vitriol.

“I think I’m voting for a third party. These choices don’t impress me.”

“You’re throwing away your vote! A vote for the third party is a vote for (insert whomever this person hates)!”

There are many logical problems with this line of reasoning…

And I use the term ‘reasoning’ very loosely. Very simply put, there is no such thing as a throw-away vote. Voting is a non-obligatory right. The thing people forget about rights is that they are by definition a two-way street. You have just as much a right to do something as to choose not to do it. And when it comes to the presidency, voting for anyone is as good as a vote thrown in the trash because of the electoral college. But no matter what, your voice is being counted. Sort of.

Huh? Yeah, it’s confusing. Unnecessarily so. The electoral college is something we’ve gone over in pretty fair detail in the episode Your Votes Don’t Count, so I’ll leave it alone here for the sake of brevity.

Yes, it’s true that some states don’t bother tallying votes with write-ins or parties that don’t get a certain amount of votes or some such garbage, but all of that is irrelevant because here’s the key point to remember: if you’re choosing to vote for someone other than the two given choices, that means you weren’t going to vote for either of them anyway, so why the hell is a vote of any kind wasted? This absurd notion that voting for a third party automatically casts a vote for the “other guy/gal” (meanwhile, how is it determined which of the two gets that vote, anyway?) is absolutely meritless in the debate realm. You don’t understand math at that point.

Voting is supposed to be a personal choice.

So please don’t berate people for their decisions. If someone doesn’t want to vote, that’s a valid choice. It’s still expressing a choice, and they’re still entitled to complain if things don’t go their way… because the sad reality of voting is that you have no guarantee you’re going to get your way, anyhow. Think about it. If you get out-voted about dinner, and you sit there bitching about not getting pizza, the others are going to tell you to suck it up, buttercup, you lost the vote. You have no room to complain, because that’s how the game is played. Does that feel fair? You can’t vent because the majority says so? Nope, that’s not the point of democracy. That’s an add-on colloquially injected by jerks, basically.

Now, getting back to this personal choice idea: if you’re probably going to get stuck with something you’d rather not choose anyway, you’d be throwing away principles to cast a choice for someone you felt pressured to support because “we have to beat the other side!” and “no third party can possible win.”

Why can’t a different ideology be the one that beats the tyrant? It is actually possible. Because math. There are more independents than either “major” party. If people voted the way they wanted to, it would create an actual need for political competition. Right now, both parties are effectively corrupted by the same elements: lobbyists, lots of money, and lots of cronies to keep happy. If people voted for four or five parties instead of two, there would be more chances for representation of different ideas. There’s absolutely no reason this should not be attempted in America, and it is most certainly not impossible.

This would get too long if I went into ideas about how to rally together and achieve this, so I’ll move on.

You probably shouldn’t even vote.

Okay, maybe not you, specifically. Maybe you do your homework (even if you skipped math). But to pressure people to vote about issues or for politicians they have little to no opinion on at all is actually kind of reckless. Imagine if you’re in a hospital waiting room and a doctor is about to operate on a loved one. The doctor comes out and asks the family to each cast a vote for their opinion on whether procedure A or procedure B should be done. Well, sure, you have an opinion… the best option! But what is it? Well, chances are you have next to no clue compared to that doctor. But if you’re only option is choose between two procedures, of which you know little about, that might easily end in disaster more than if you were allowed to defer to those that task themselves with learning the ins and outs of that particular knowledge base.

Sure, we should all care enough to research candidates, policies, law, medicine, philosophy, astrophysics, microbiology, ancient Greek mythology, forensic nursing, geology, foreign film studies, and the names and final forms of every stupid Pokemon, but you know what? We don’t have time for all of that, sadly.

It’s actually more laudable to vote for what speaks to you, or to not vote at all if you feel you lack understanding about the issue, than to vote for the sake of voting. If anything were to be called a “throw away vote,” it would be the votes that are cast to fulfill the grandest bullshit of all: civil duty.