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Dr. Jill Stein’s initiative for an election recount is in process as of this writing. Regardless of the outcome of that process, what follows remains true.
Let’s leave aside issues around whether the Democratic primary was fixed and even your notions of who had the better plan for America. Forget about who was more inspirational or more pragmatic, who and what spoke to your fondest dreams and let’s simply focus on what we faced in the general election.
It came down to Clinton, Trump and a few other candidates who could not possibly win the Presidency. If you voted for Jill Stein as a protest vote or you refused to vote, you surely made a statement. The question I pose here is whether you made the statement you truly wanted to make. Often, integrity isn’t as simple as we want it to be.
The 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush at last hinged on the results in Florida. It is a sad tale of hanging chad, intervention in the people’s election by the Supreme Court and the votes of tens of thousands of Floridians being ignored, leaving Bush a victory of just over 500 votes.
Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, ran in that election and garnered 97,488 votes in Florida. This from RealClearPolitics.com:
Political scientist Gerald Pomper summed up the results [of the 2000 Presidential election results in Florida] in a 2001 Political Science Quarterly overview: “approximately half (47 percent) of the Nader voters said they would choose Gore in a two-man race, a fifth (21 percent) would choose Bush, and a third (32 percent) would not vote. Applying these figures to the actual vote, Gore would have achieved a net gain of 26,000 votes in Florida, far more than needed to carry the state easily [emphasis added].”
Had that happened, we likely would not have invaded Iraq, a country that never attacked us and never posed a WMD threat to us or anyone else. Had Gore been President, do the math on how many now dead people would be alive today, how many trillions of dollars we would not owe and the likely condition of the Middle East right now. All of that bad stuff happened and more because about 26,000 Floridians stood on their short-sighted principles.
With a switch to Clinton of only 107,000 Jill Stein votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Donald J. Trump would be holed up in his gold tower right now and nobody would be paying him any attention. We wouldn’t be fearing extremist policies and unconstitutional actions. Note that the voting adjustment proposed here doesn’t even consider the people who stayed home but would have voted for Clinton in a two way race.
Elections have consequences, so your vote has consequences. When you stand on principle and refuse to concede that the better of a two choice pair is preferable over enabling the worst to happen, you ensure that the worst does, indeed. happen. It just did. Again.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
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Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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