Is voting for a third-party candidate a waste? It’s your vote. You get to choose.
Q. Is it wasting your vote to support a third-party candidate for President?
A. Wasting a vote is a nebulous concept. In the modern election culture, a wasted vote is seen as one that is cast for a candidate who did not have a legitimate chance of winning. The argument is that the vote could have been cast for a more viable (major party) candidate and thus would have been more productive in helping decide the election.
There are a few problems with this logic. It is worth noting that significant elections are rarely decided by a single vote or even a small number of votes. In 2020, despite being a very close election, the final margin for Joe Biden over Donald Trump was over 7 million votes. In a country the size of the United States, a couple of percentage points is millions of votes.
However, the national popular vote is not determinative. In fact, candidates have lost the popular vote and still won the election. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by over a half-million votes but still won the election through the Electoral College. American Presidential elections are a series of state-by-state contests. Other than Nebraska and Maine, every state is winner-take-all. A candidate might run a high margin in, say, California, but lose Wisconsin or Ohio narrowly and thus lose. In our Electoral College system, votes in close states are more important than in less competitive ones.
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For a small number of votes to matter, a couple of things would have to align. First, the race would have to close in the Electoral College, meaning that one or two states could sway the outcome. Second, the state that decides the outcome would need to have a very close count. That’s essentially what happened in 2000, when Al Gore lost the deciding state of Florida by 537 votes out of the nearly 6 million cast. Certainly, close enough that had some of the 97 thousand in Florida who voted for Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader supported Al Gore, the outcome might have been different. Of course, by the same logic, George W. Bush would have benefited from a portion of the 16 thousand votes cast for Libertarian Candidate Harry Browne.
While Florida in 2000 was fairly exceptional, we can and do have close races. In 2016, Donald Trump won a comfortable victory in the Electoral College, but when you look closer the margin was about 80,000 votes over 6 competitive states. In 2020, Joe Biden's victory was also sizable in the Electoral College and the popular vote, but was based on narrow victories in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Indeed, the margin in Arizona was only about 10,000 votes.
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Generally, I do not like the label of wasted votes, as I do believe that civic participation matters whether your candidate wins or loses. Further, in most states, the margins will be high enough that a small number of votes will not change anything. However, in a close race, a third-party candidate could very well collect enough votes to tilt the outcome. Nonetheless, it is still your vote and you get to choose.
Kevin Wagner is a noted constitutional scholar and political science professor at Florida Atlantic University. The answers provided do not necessarily represent the views of the university. If you have a question about how American government and politics work, email him at kwagne15@fau.edu.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Is voting for a third-party candidate in an election a waste?
