We conservatives are not in an ordinary political situation.
I mean to make a much more informal and homely point: it is wrong to think of a vote Leading Contender B. Although, as fellow conservatives, we think very alike on nearly everything in political life, the national disaster of the choice between Trump and Clinton has produced diametrically opposed conclusions.
One close friend says that the harm Hillary Clinton would do, building on Barack Obama’s eight years, would be so incalculably awful that the risk of an inept, foolish, and thuggish Donald Trump presidency is worth taking in order to prevent Clinton’s victory.
The question—“If your vote were decisive, what would you do?
”—invites us to think of the civic function of voting that one vote each of us casts.
” It was an earnest question, and I gave an honest answer.
But then I felt obliged to object to the question, and I want to elaborate upon my objections here.We could well remember when 19 percent of the electorate voted for Ross Perot in 1992, securing him zero votes in the electoral college but arguably delivering a victory for Bill Clinton over George H. Bush’s squeaker victory in Florida over Al Gore in 2000.Didn’t these people know that the perfect is the enemy of the good? “Not making the perfect the enemy of the good” is not the right adage for calculating what to do in our present predicament.Neither prospectively nor retrospectively, therefore, can we ever say that we alone are burdened with the whole responsibility of decision in a close election.But the secrecy and the rough simultaneity of our ballot-casting are just what enable people to frame the question my colleague asked me.Even the current trend toward early voting by mail or “absentee” balloting does not alter the personal experience each of us has of not knowing the exact weight of our own ballot in the final outcome.If it turned out, in a particular election, that the result hinged on a single vote, even then we could not say that our own single vote was truly determinative as the “tie-breaker,” for this would also be true of that turned on a choice between the victor and the runner-up.A one-vote margin of victory in any election—let alone a nationwide presidential election—is an exceedingly rare occurrence that most of us will never experience.But more importantly, we all vote more or less simultaneously, and we do so with secret ballots.The voter who did not much like either Nixon or Humphrey as ideal could put their policies and probabilities in the balance and choose the lesser evil because in truth each man had much good that could be said of him.Now, however, we really do have two to choose between—or to decline choosing.
Comments Essays Over Voting
A Vote's Consequences and a Voter's Conscience - Public.
Jul 22, 2016. “If your vote were the deciding one in the election, with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump becoming president on the basis of your vote.…
Essay A. - The John Marshall Law School Law Review
Mar 21, 2019. Essay A Historical Overview of Disenfranchisement, the Voting Rights Act, and Shelby County's Impact on the 2018 Midterm Elections.…
An early look at the 2020 electorate Pew Research Center
Jan 30, 2019. It remains unclear how these patterns might factor into the 2020 election and, as always, a great deal will depend on who turns out to vote.…
Suppressing Voting Rights Is as Old as the Republic—But the.
Oct 8, 2018. The more that efforts to suppress voting rights in America change, the more. would seem familiar to those involved in the antebellum fights over voting. This essay is part of What It Means to Be American, a project of the.…
How Selecting Voters Randomly Can Lead to Better Elections.
May 16, 2012. And we rely on randomly selected citizens to serve on juries, where they. Chaum's model enables voters to verify online that the choices on.…
Odyssey Project participants share why voting matters in 2018.
Oct 18, 2018. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Odyssey Project's "Why Vote?" essay contest is an effort to convince nonvoters to cast ballots on Nov. 6.…
What We Can All Do at This Moment Is Vote The New Yorker
Nov 5, 2018. Reflecting on a piece that he wrote about the 1992 election, Roger Angell writes about what voting means to him in the age of Donald Trump.…
The Women's Rights Movement, 1848-1920 US House of.
Women's suffrage leaders, moreover, often disagreed about the tactics and. issues” zealots by focusing their message exclusively on the right to vote.3 In 1869.…
Essay on voting rights - Get Help From Custom College Essay.
Essay on voting rights - High-Quality Research Paper Writing Website - Order Original Essays, Research Papers, Reviews and Proposals For Me Quality.…
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Learn about the civil rights legislation that outlawed discrimination in jobs, education, housing, public accommodations, and voting.…