No. Do not vote Hillary. For the Love of god and all that is holy dont vote either of them. Vote Gary Johnson. Vote third party. All votes matter and a third party vote is never wasted. Abraham Lincoln was a third party candidate. It is NEVER WASTED.

Except this isn’t even remotely the same and it will be a wasted vote because there’s no way in hell a third party vote will be enough to out number the Republican Trump voters and we’ll end up with a literal actual fascist in the White House.

Don’t vote third party, not in this election. Now is not the time for a protest vote.

Vote Hillary in and then CONTINUE to vote in all your smaller elections. The majority of congress is up for election this year. You wanna see change, you want to make your voice heard? STAY POLITICALLY ACTIVE AND KEEP VOTING. You’re right, every vote can and does count, you can help change the course of American politics and history, but it doesn’t end with the Presidential election. But voting Hillary is the start.

It’s worth noting that even crowdiamagio has changed their stance at this point.

I know Tumblr is largely young and likes to sometimes poke fun at us older people, but please, in this case, listen to those of us who voted in 2000. I GET the idea of a protest vote and wanting a viable third party. I do. I was all about that in 2000. I, along with a lot of other idealistic people, voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I wasn’t crazy about Gore, but I was convinced that SURELY the American people couldn’t elect someone like Dubya. (I mean, the question is whether the American people actually DID, but that’s another rant.)

I was wrong. We got eight years of one of the worst administrations in US history.

This election IS NOT THE TIME for a protest vote. There’s too much at stake. I don’t care if you don’t like Hillary on a personal basis. She is one of the most qualified people to ever run for President, and her “scandals” are either part of an elaborate 20 year smear campaign or literally no worse than any other politician’s. (See John Oliver’s raisin analogy.)

I honestly do not know how anybody could watch the debates last night and come out of it thinking that Donald Trump is in any way suited to be president. That leaves Hillary. A third party candidate is not going to win. To vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is literally only going to help Trump. Nothing else.

Save your protest votes for local elections, for a year when the choices are not so dire. This election is literally going to mean life or death for a lot of people in the US, and if you’re on this site, chances are good you’re one of them.

Further resources: 

• “Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral” 
• this segment from “On the Media.” 
• “There’s No Such Thing As A Protest Vote”

Here’s a quote from the last one, by Clay Shirky: 

Throwing away your vote on a message no one will hear, and which will change no outcome, is sometimes presented as ‘voting your conscience’, but that’s got it exactly backwards; your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people. Citizens who vote for third-party candidates, write-in candidates, or nobody aren’t voting their conscience, they are voting their ego, unable to accept that a system they find personally disheartening actually applies to them.

I’m hunting for a fantastic tweet I saw recently, about how saying things like, “I live in a blue state, my vote doesn’t matter, I can vote however I want” essentially creates a two-tiered system, where you grant yourself the INCREDIBLY privileged status of “voting with your heart” while your neighbors do the work of making sure that state stays blue and we don’t all die in a nuclear holocaust. 

It’s extraordinary how third-party voters are framing this as a question of ethics, when it’s really your privilege versus collective pragmatism. And as Shirky says in that piece, the major third parties are deeply ineffectual—charities and foundations actually doing this good, moral work could use your dollars and your vocal support to help enact change. 

I’m glad the OP (or rather, the first reblogger) has changed their mind, but something absurd, like a third of all under-30s?? are voting third party. Please, please, please spread the word: it’s true, a third-party vote isn’t a waste. It’s just a vote for yourself, and a big fuck you to the rest of us. 

I will keep spouting this statistic until the end of time:

If even 1% of the people who voted for Nader in Florida (not 1% of the people who voted in Florida, 1% of the people who voted for Nader in Florida) had voted for Gore instead, Bush would never have been president.

Bush beat Gore by less than the # of votes for Nader in both Florida and New Hampshire; in that election, even getting NH’s 4 measly electoral votes would have changed the outcome. But I’m not sure young people today realize just how fucking close the vote in Florida was.

This isn’t hypothetical - this happened less than 20 years ago. And it can happen again this year.