The Dash Brothers Voters Guide


All you Super Tuesday voters, gather round. We offer our thoughts not on who to vote for but on how to vote. Consider, and make your own choice.

We are not believers in symbolic votes. We believe in voting for the candidate we believe has the best chance to do the most good, and stop the most evil. This is a kind of calculation, but it is to our minds a better one than the calculation of "I'll vote for that person even though he or she has no chance of winning, because [fill in the blank: to send a message, they seem nice and likeable, I feel sorry for them, etc.] and anyway, IT WON'T MATTER, the frontrunner doesn't need my vote.

This is gambling---making decisions based on an outcome you foresee but which has not yet happened. It is always dangerous. You have to calculate what you might lose. When you buy a lottery ticket, all you can possibly lose is the buck you paid for it. When you vote symbolically, you risk a dire outcome. For instance, G.W. Bush.

In a state like California, where the Democratic candidate is expected to do very well, there is already a movement to "swap votes" with voters in other more apparently contested states: so a Democrat in CA will vote for the Green candidate, in exchange for a Green party partisan in, say, Ohio, voting for the Dem. We don't support this. Our confidence in the media's ability to forecast the future is not that high. The fun of guessing outcomes stops at the voting booth. Vote for the candidate who has the best chance of doing the most good and stopping the most evil, wherever you are.

Lastly, we urge voters everywhere to become actively engaged in the ongoing debate and ongoing process of how voting itself is being conducted. Tomorrow many of us in CA, Maryland and other states (Ohio we're pretty sure) are going to be using touch-screen machines that supposedly register our vote. There is currently no way to verify that our votes are registered and counted correctly. There are many ways to sabotage these machines and change the outcomes.

This is especially troubling when the CEO of the company that manufactures the most used of these machines is a Bush partisan who has said in public that he "guarantees" Ohio will go for Bush.

Tell your local officials that you want a system that leaves a paper trail---that if you're using some form of electronic system, you want a paper receipt that shows your votes were recorded properly, just like you get when you use a credit card. Demand a system that tallies the number of live walking and talking people who come to vote with the number of votes counted.

If the integrity of voting is compromised, every state will be Florida, and we'll be waxing nostalgic for the verifiability of the hanging chads.