Agreed. The fear of cannabis bugs me to no end. But the Dems are no better. The one thing I thought we'd get from Bill Clinton he didn't bother to do. Good think I never voted for him.
A letter to the editor I sent last October:
The ballot that voters will use in next month’s election will list only Republican and Democratic candidates for many public offices. Several other races, however, will offer voters the opportunity to choose a “third-party” candidate. These candidates, although sometimes propelled by nothing more than vanity, more typically campaign as the only genuine alternative to major-party contestants who have few meaningful differences between them.
Many voters agree about the deficiencies of the Republican and Democratic offerings, but nonetheless reject the idea of choosing a third-party candidate as “throwing away their vote.” A third-party vote, in this view, is wasted on a challenger who has no realistic chance of winning---while that vote is denied to the “lesser of two evils” major-party contender, thus making likelier the victory of the least-favored candidate. This view is seriously misguided.
In voting districts that, at their smallest, include tens of thousands of voters, statistics dictate that it is extremely unlikely for any race to be decided by a single vote (and for a statewide race, this possibility can be completely ignored). So each voter must realize that their vote will not by itself tip the scales.
A common response to this point is, “What if everybody voted that way?” The implication of that question is that third-party voting can, in the aggregate, swing the election to the least-favored candidate. However, the question has a straightforward, and obvious, answer. In these times of increasing dissatisfaction with political “business as usual,” if everybody voted for the candidate whose platform they most believed in, the stranglehold of the major parties would be broken and the victory of third-party challengers would become a real possibility---as it became reality in Minnesota when Jesse Ventura was elected governor.
Is this a likely outcome in the short term? Perhaps not. But until that day comes, the only practical significance of one’s vote is to send a message---to the eventual winner, to that candidate’s party, and to all those who may seek that office in the future. What message do you want to send?