Third-party votes wasted

A letter in the July 22 Daily Herald extolled the Green Party candidate as a choice for voters dissatisfied with the mainstream candidates. The day before, amid the hullabaloo about Biden dropping out, RFK Jr asserted that it was now a “two-man race” between him and Trump. Pipe dreams aside, no third-party presidential candidate ever in U.S. history has come close to winning. Only four of them got double digit shares of the popular vote, and only one of those — Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 — achieved a double-digit share of the electoral vote.

In the current race, I doubt that many people even know the Green Party candidate’s name, and RFK Jr’s declining poll numbers are now in single digits. Because no third-party candidacy is remotely viable, the hard political reality is that casting a ballot for one of them is a wasted vote. Like it or not, the election comes down to the two mainstream candidates. You may dislike both of them, but odds are you dislike one of them more than the other. Voting for an independent candidate, as good as she or he may be, increases the odds that the mainstream person you like least will be elected. (Not voting at all has the same effect, by the way.)

Voting is a right that should be exercised judiciously. Rather than voting simply to make a statement, the strategic choice would be to vote to keep your least desirable mainstream candidate from winning, even if voting for the lesser of two evils requires you to hold your nose when casting the ballot.

Bob Dohn

Hoffman Estates