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“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Sir Winston Churchill

You can quibble about the definition of ‘democracy’ but the key is the vote. Without the vote you have guaranteed tyranny. You can expand the franchise or contract the franchise and your results may vary, but the government must absolutely be accountable to the people.

“If you don’t vote, you’ve got no right to complain.” – Anonymous

Provided your race, class, gender, or citizenship doesn’t preclude you from voting, you have a responsibility to vote. If you don’t, then you are abdicating your role as a citizen and demonstrating your lack of belief in the system of government.

So, the first principle is the sanctity of the vote and your responsibility to exercise your vote. The second principle is that you accept the legitimacy of the vote (meaning not that you accept rigged elections, but that the legitimate winner has the right to govern). This means that you can fight for clean and accurate tallies of the vote, but you cannot complain about the rules. If you think the rules can and should be improved it is your responsibility to fight for those changes in the next election or the election after that. But, in the meantime, the rules are to be respected and a winner understands, abides by, and masters the rules. If you want proportional representation, fight for a constitutional amendment, but while you’re waiting to win that battle you can’t abdicate your obligation to vote because you don’t like winner-take-all elections. In the meantime, understand, abide by, and master the rules. Obama understood this, while Clinton did not. Don’t let the wrong people govern this county because you were hung up on the rules or refused to master them.

The third principle is that your vote is your own and you have every right to exercise it however you want. You have the right to cast a protest vote, to leave a ballot line blank, to write-in a candidate, or to utilize strategic voting where appropriate. But always, always do so with the most information possible and with a thorough mastery of the rules. It’s bad enough to allow your vote to be wasted, but it’s worse to cast a counterproductive vote.

Every country has a slightly different set of rules. But applying these three principles will work in every country that allows a free and fair vote. In the United States of America, we have rules that are laid out in the Constitution that dictate how federal elections work. Individual states have a little bit of leeway in applying those rules, but not much. Know your state’s rules.

In America, we have winner-take-all federal elections, which means that a third-party vote only counts if the third-party candidate actually wins. In some instances, third-parties can gain certain advantages in a future election by reaching, say, a 5% threshold in the current election. If you are voting to help a third-party gain future advantages, make sure you understand all the information available, including the latest polls, so you don’t waste your vote.

Always keep in mind that in a winner-take-all system, the stronger a left-leaning third party does in the current election, the more likely that the Republican will win the election, and that the stronger a right-leaning third-party does, the more likely the Democrat will win the election. Is that what you want? Make sure you are certain. Look at the polls in your state or district to make sure your vote makes strategic sense. Is your vote a potentially deciding vote? Act accordingly.

Let me use a real world example to make my point. In the 2006 Pennsylvania senate race, I opposed the nomination of Bob Casey Jr. for the Democratic ticket. I worked to defeat him, but it was a hopeless cause. As the general election between Sen. Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr. approached, I looked at the polls and the polls told me that Bob Casey Jr. was going to win in a walk. I knew that I would not be casting a deciding vote, so I had to make a decision about what kind of message I wanted to send with my vote. I could have voted for the green candidate to express my displeasure with Bob Casey. I could have left the ballot blank for the same reason. I could have voted for Santorum to make Casey’s victory less resounding. But I chose to vote for Casey to make Santorum’s defeat as large as it was humanly possible for me to make it. Any decision was rational because I knew Casey had the thing won. I sent the message I wanted to send. My girlfriend sent a different message and I never questioned her decision for a second. If the polls had been deadlocked, I would have a made decision based not on what message I wanted to send, but on who I wanted between Casey and Santorum. In that case, I still would have voted for Casey because I thought Santorum was such a horrible person to have representing me. Yet, in either case, my decision was based on the most information I could gather and a full understanding of the rules. I was going to make my vote count for what I wanted it to count for.

Yet, it is now my responsibility to work to assure that the 2010 senate election against Arlen Specter doesn’t involve the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) clearing the field of all pro-choice candidates without the benefit of a Democratic voter’s primary. I didn’t like the way the Casey’s coronation went down in 2006 and I have no right to complain unless I am willing to try to change the rules of the game in 2010.

If you understand what I’m saying here, you’ll understand why I am committed to working to improve this country through the use of elections, within one of the two major parties, without bitching about the rules in the middle of an election cycle, and why I am so impatient with people that blithely drop out, threaten not to vote, threaten to vote non-strategically for a third-party, threaten to move to another country, or otherwise show more petulance and dissatisfaction with the rules than appreciation for the people that put their nose to the grindstone and try to push that seeming Sisyphusian rock back up that hill.

Who’s naive? The person that has mastered the rules or the person that ignores the rules and tells you that you are wasting your time in even trying to play by them? And what, by the way, would the purists and the holier-than-thou jokers yell from the peanut gallery if all the fighters stopped fighting and ceded the field to the right? That is assuming they’d be able to comment at all, after the thought police got a hold of them.