said by Os:I'm saying it's inconsistent to support personal freedom and vote for either of them. You had a line about Mitt Romney in your signature. I'm proud to say I voted for neither of the major candidates, and this was a major reason.
The reason of course was because voting for an idealistic third party candidate who agrees 100% with my views but who has absolutely no chance of winning has the same net effect as voting for the candidate with whom I disagree with on 99.9999999% of the issues.
If you find my argument specious, then please ask all the people who voted for Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 how they felt about Bill Clinton winning in those elections. Or look at Florida in 2000. 98k people in that election voted for Ralph Nader. How do you think they felt about Bush winning that state and the Presidency by 537 votes? Even if you blame that on fraud, had all (or even half of) 98k of those people voted for Al Gore, he would have won that state by a comfortable margin.
I'm not going to blame people who voted for third party candidates for Romney losing (3 million or so fewer GOP voters showed up in 2012 than in 2008). But I am simply presenting to you the mathematical reasoning behind my consistently voting the way I do. Perhaps we should change things to allow for instant run-off voting and requiring that the winner of such a contest receive a majority of the votes. But until that happens, I have to accept voting for third party candidates for what it is, a vote for the guy i disagree with the most.