Nothing about this year’s election is ordinary.
Americans are faced with two major options: Donald Trump and (presumptively) Hillary Clinton.
According to a poll published in the Boston Globe, 81 percent of Americans fear for one of these two options. While this might seem normal, because of the natural polarization of Republican and Democratic viewpoints, it is even more off-putting that around 25 percent of Americans fear for either candidate’s presidency. A quarter of the voting population wants neither mainstream option.
This fear could lead these people to seek out other candidates that are neither Republican nor Democrat.
Perhaps some of the more moderate Republicans will go for the Libertarian party’s nominee ‒ Gary Johnson.
Johnson believes in the Libertarian slogan of “Maximum Freedom, Minimum Government.” He wants little government intervention in all parts of society. He has liberal tendencies on social issues. He supports same-sex marriage and although personally does not believe in abortion, he understands that women have a right to their own body, thus a right to make their own decisions on the subject. He also supports the legalization of marijuana and wants to protect the environment. At the same time, he wants to put a value on religion. Economically, he wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with a single consumption tax as well as eliminate the current tax code that punishes most Americans rather than rewards savings and productivity.
If Gary Johnson is too conservative for some, those people may look towards Jill Stein, the nominee from the Green Party.
Stein is very liberal. She wants to transition to 100 percent clean energy within the next 15 years as well as guarantee human rights. She wants to ensure that our people, all of them, have access to clean water, food, and shelter. Stein wishes to increase the minimum wage. Her goals are to end police brutality and expand rights for minorities, including women, the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, and African Americans. Stein wants a representative democracy; she wants to break up the big banks and ensure that the American people, not rich portions of them, have control of the government.
Voting for a third party seems like the answer to the issue. If someone doesn’t like one of the major candidates, they can just research and vote for a smaller, third party. It’s all the same, right?
Wrong.
America’s electoral system uses a plurality as its benchmark. This means that although a candidate must have a simple majority (50 percent + 1) to win the presidency with electoral college votes, they do not need a majority in each individual state in order to win that state’s electoral votes.
A plurality based system often leads to the creation of a two-party system. In America, two major parties dominate the elections ‒ the Republicans and the Democrats. Our voting system makes it very difficult for third parties to gain any electoral votes even if they received some of the popular votes.
The odds of a third party’s candidate winning the presidency is slim, but that’s not the issue.
Voting for a third party can often create phenomena known as the spoiler effect.
The spoiler effect occurs when a non-winning candidate on the ballot can affect which other candidate wins the election. In a plurality system, this can happen very easily, even if the spoiler candidate has little support.
Let’s say there are two major parties (A and B) and one-third party (b) that has similar viewpoints to major party B, but perhaps one different view on one subject. The voters who are going to vote for Party b would be okay with Party B winning the election since they have similar ideologies, but they’d rather have Party b. They don’t like Party A at all.
Party A and Party B usually split the votes evenly. Last year’s election, Party A won with 47 percent of the vote and Party B won with 49 percent of the vote.
This year, however, Party b is going to take 3 percent of the votes from Party B. This leaves Party B with 46 percent of the votes, Party b with 3 percent, and Party A with 47 percent.
Because the candidate only needs a plurality to receive the electoral votes in each state, Party A would win the votes even though more people wanted a president with an ideology close to that of Party B and Party b.
Party B could have won the presidency had Party b not spoiled it for them.
As seen in the example above, the spoiler often has a similar ideology to the candidate it ‘spoils’ but has a very different ideology to the winning candidate in most scenarios.
This year, for example, Jill Stein could potentially be the spoiler and she could spoil Hillary Clinton’s campaign, even though her ideology is more similar to Clinton’s than it is to Trump’s. On the other side of the spectrum, Gary Johnson could act as a spoiler to Trump’s campaign as well.
Some may argue against the spoiler effect, saying that third parties have always been around and that elections haven’t been affected by it in the past. They’re wrong.
Many blame the spoiler effect, with a combination of a few other factors, for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000.
It was a very close race throughout the country between these two men, but it all came down to Florida’s votes. In Florida, a third party, the Green Party, campaigned with Ralph Nader. When the voting process came, many voters in Florida decided to vote for Nader. He received 97,488 popular votes, leaving Gore to lose to Bush by 537 votes in the state. Although Gore and Nader, both proponents of environmental protection, were the candidates on the liberal side of the spectrum, Nader’s gain of votes caused Bush to win the state and thus, the election. Had Nader not run in Florida or not run at all, those votes would have most likely gone to Gore, thus pushing him to victory in the 2000 election.
The spoiler effect is real and it affects elections on a smaller scale all of the time, but it can and it will affect national elections. Because of the immense distrust for both of the candidates, voters may flock to thirty party candidates.
The truth is that unless half of the population rallies behind one third party candidate ‒ which they won’t, because all of the third parties are nearly as polarized as the two parties now ‒ the third party will not be able to win. It’s the way our system runs.
It might not be democratic, knowing that we’re stuck in this two party system and that a vote to someone else, no matter how much we like or agree with their policies, won’t truly matter, but that is the way it will be until the electoral system is changed altogether.
The spoiler effect will remain in place and we must be aware of it.
I’m not saying you can’t vote for a third party, but know the repercussions behind that vote before you cast it. If you decide to vote for Stein instead of Clinton, know that you might be handing the election to Trump. If you’d rather vote for Johnson than Trump, you might be giving Clinton a shot at being president.
Is this election turning out to be a vote for the “lesser of two evils” situation? Possibly.
If you don’t like that we are constrained to the two-party system, voting for a third party won’t help you. Changing the electoral system is the only way to open up our voting process, but that’s a topic for another day.
As you cast your vote in November, just remember that all votes contribute to an outcome. With knowing the consequences of a third party vote, what does your vote say about you and the outcome that you want?
