Third Party Project Safe States Strategy

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Categories: Third parties | 2004 elections

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HOW TO VOTE SAFELY FOR A THIRD PARTY

Beginner Instructions. There are two components to voting safely for a third party or independent candidate. 1.) check the polling in your state often and just before the election, and 2.) tell any pollster who happens to ask that you will NOT be voting for either the Democratic or Republican candidates.

Pre-election polling is checked so you will know whether to vote for the Democratic candidate or if the race is not at all close whether you can vote a third choice. That's common sense. Or it should be anyway.

Telling pollsters that you are not voting for the Democratic candidate is done in order to skew margin of error factors in the safe direction. It would make your state appear less safe than it actually might be.

So if your state is not close and you have told pollsters you are not voting for the Democratic candidate, you are safe to vote for whomever you want.

Intermediate Instructions. If you have followed the beginner instructions and feel comfortable in the political pool you may be ready to leave the shallow end.

In this case your favorite in this election is the Democratic candidate, but you know that next time that that may not be the case. In this situation you need to be prepared to vote "strategically" for a "safe" candidate that is not to your liking. It's called sending a message.

Of course, the Democratic and Republican parties are pretty dense at times and they may not get the actual message you are sending - that it's time for IRV or IRV-P. But that's ok, because there are experts out there getting that message through and your vote has helped them.

Expert Instructions. I won't go into a lot of detail here because it's a big topic. Experts are expected to know how to, and be actively working at, lobbying their state reps for electoral reforms (again IRV or IRV-P etc.), communicating with third parties in their state, and working at building coalitions among third parties to work in concert to achieve electoral reform.

Who to Vote for Where in 2004