Every four years, the United States of America must pull together and cast their votes, exercising the long fought for right that is, at its very core, the basis of the country. The founding fathers escaped monarchical Britain in order to establish a country founded upon the principles of democracy. At the onset of this founding, of course, women and people of color were excluded from the vote, but it’s 2016, and after 200 some years, we all have a voice.
However, there are those that choose to misuse that vote via a not so new phenomenon called protest voting. A protest vote, in it’s simplest definition, is a vote cast for a third party representative. In this year’s election, we have two which will appear on the ballot. Jill Stein, the representative of the Green Party, will be on the ballot in 48 states. Gary Johnson of the Libertarian party will be available on ballots nationwide.
The real danger of this election not only lies in the actual hellish realization that there are people in this country who see Donald Trump as an actually qualified candidate, based inexplicably on his supposed “business skill,” but that our young voters have chosen to ignore this insanity and vote not along party lines, but for the aforementioned third party candidates. When Senator Bernie Sanders promised not to run for a third party seat, he did so in order to prevent the splitting of the party’s votes. Sanders did so because he was a voice of reason, amidst the chaos. He understood the danger of a Trump presidency, and the reality of modern politics.
The protest vote is a factor of chaos. Inherently, the concept of a protest vote is not in anyway an evil thing. Who can really blame a person for voting their interests? Is this not, at the core of it, our real right? Well, of course it is. However, the way that we have designed modern politics to work is based entirely on a two-party voting system. Our congressmen and women feign bipartisanship sometimes, and the rest of the time they vote within their well-defined party lines. Nowhere in this arrangement is their space for a third party. This is not necessarily a good reality, but it is the American reality, and the essence of change is not something that we have yet learned to expedite.
It is, at this time, important to understand and recognize the impact of the Sanders campaign as well as the Clinton campaign. Sanders showed America that the public is ready for a return to certain aspects of socialism— remember how Nixon proposed a health insurance plan far less stringent than the insurance plan that is currently in action? Socialism is a dirty word in our modern jargon, but we’ve been shown that it doesn’t have to remain as such. Protest voting, however, leads us into a future where we as a society may face the possibility of taking several massive steps back in time, and not in a good way.
Secretary Hillary Clinton showed us that there is no amount of qualification that can win you popularity. Amidst the email scandals and the Lewinsky event, which we as a society have still not let go of, Clinton still faces intense scrutiny. The obvious answer is here is the problem the populace has with the mere existence of a powerful woman within the political structure. Clinton shows us every single day that she campaigns, that the female struggle for power is an endless uphill struggle. Though she remains an unpopular candidate, it is impossible to ignore that no one else on the ballot will be able to deliver a solid presidency other than Secretary Clinton.
The simplest way to hit home the purpose of this writing is to say this: Donald Trump cannot become our next president. Donald trump is not qualified to become a leader, in any way. He is very openly sexist, racist, and clueless beyond human comprehension. By splitting the vote, by voting third party, we as a nation allow for the possibility of his presidency, and in most anyone’s calculations, injure the future for an unintelligible amount of time and history.
