Why I didn't vote for President

You can stop your mailing and calling to me now. My absentee ballot is in the mail. I wonder what impact early voting will have on the various campaigns -- especially how much money and effort will be wasted in the late days of the campaign, because the people they contact will have already voted.


Here is my comment to "Open Thread: Why Vote for Your Candidate?" in Have Coffee Will Write: on the Presidential election (revised to reflect the decision made):

The decision on whether to vote for a Presidential candidate has been a dilemma for me. On the one hand, it feels wrong to leave the spot blank — if you don’t vote for a particular office, you lose your right to complain about the person who gets elected. On the other hand, I am a secessionist, and it makes little sense to vote for the one office that is dedicated to holding together the Union.

The secessionist got the upper hand.

I would point out that Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain have voted the same way on 25 major issues, and on another list of 31 issues, voted the same way 44% of the time; which suggests that George Wallace was right when he said “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties. Some people would consider my choice to be a wasted vote — but we won’t have better choices until we have the courage to vote for them, and voting for the “lesser of two evils” is still voting for an evil (at least in one’s own mind).