Ok, people, listen up .
. .
. . . I did not waste
my vote!
For many years now I
have become more and more disillusioned with the two-party system in this
country. We are trapped, forced into
choosing between the favorites of the party elites. This year’s election was a perfect example of this. By the time the Democrats were done, the
party elite had given us a politician so polarizing that many independent
voters in this country, people who had voted for a Democratic candidate in the
past, would not vote for her. And the
Republicans, they couldn’t even get together behind one of their own; instead,
they nominated a celebrity, a mercurial self-promoter who has in the past
professed to being a Democrat. Most who
voted for one or the other of the major candidates did so, not in belief in the
character and competency of that candidate, but in an attempt to stop the
election of the other.
I could not bring
myself to vote for either of the candidates.
I looked to other candidates, representatives of the various ‘lesser’
parties of this country, but not one candidate proved themselves worthy of the
vote that I would cast.
Finally, as a protest
to the system we are saddled with, I wrote in the name of a public figure whose
leadership I believed in.
What were you
thinking . . . you wasted your vote!
I’ve had a number of
people from both sides of the political spectrum tell me that. I wasted my vote.
I am about to lay some
wisdom on you folks, so listen up. Are
you ready?
“Always vote for
principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest
reflection that your vote is never lost.”
-- John Quincy Adams
In my mind, my vote is
an important reflection of my hopes and dreams. It represents the vision I have for this land. To claim that I was ‘wasting my vote’
because I didn’t vote for one of the two major party candidates is rude and
ridiculous. By that same way of
thinking, any Washingtonian who voted for Trump was wasting his or her vote,
as the Democratic candidate has carried this state in every election since
1988.
Yes, my friends, I
voted for a write-in candidate for president of the United States. One hundred and two thousand, four hundred
and fifteen other Washingtonians also placed a write-in vote for president. I’d like to think that these write-in votes
may have been an inspiration for four of Washington’s members of the Electoral
College to change their votes and not place them for the candidate who won the
states popular vote as is customary.
FYI, my write-in vote
for president of the United States went to Colin Powell.
