If me and my spouse vote for opposite candidates would it be the same if we just didn’t vote?
In: Other
No, I think there’s a number of reasons how they’re different
– There’s more than 1 candidate on a ballot, and often there’s ballot measures for particular policies you get to vote on. It’s unlikely you’re opposed on 100% of these
– Theres more to interpreting election results than just “who got more”. Obviously “who got more” is an important piece, votes do impact how politicians in the future will conduct themselves. Part of voting is sending a message of “what portion of the population supports these policies”. If there’s a lot of non-votes as a percentage of the population of the state, that sends a different message and so each of your opinions mattered less if you didn’t vote. Consider an extreme example, let’s say in a state with 1,000,000 eligible voters, you had 4 ballots cast, 3 for candidate A and 1 for candidate B. Compare this to another scenario where 100% of the population voted and it was 750,000 for candidate A and 250,000 for candidate B. These tell different stories despite the same winner. The first says that your population is disengaged from voting, and it’s left ambiguous which candidate actually has more popular policies in your state. Efforts in the future will be about voter registration and turnout and either candidate can claim their policies are actually more popular and neither feels the need to change their policies to be more appealing next election. The second scenario it’s very clear how the voters feel, it’s clear that candidate B’s policies are not viable there and something needs to change for candidate B’s party to better appeal to the voters. These are extreme examples for illustration purposes but the point is, better voter turnout sends a clearer message and low voter turnout leaves this as a question mark that’s left open to interpretation
– Third party candidates, even if neither of you vote for third party candidates (which I assume is the case based on your phrasing), this still helps show the relative popularity or possibly unpopularity of them, if neither of you vote third party, this helps tell a story that their platform is less appealing by making their piece of the pie smaller. In states with runoff elections or ranked choice and third party candidates, this can actually make the difference in whether any candidate hits 50%. Not voting could be that difference between 49.99% to 48.01% to 1% vs 50% to 48.01% to 0.99% if enough people think in the way your post mentioned. This difference could matter a lot anywhere there’s ranked choice or runoff elections where it’s not just who gets the most but if anyone gets over 50%.
– This last one depends on your personalities I suppose and is less concrete, but I think actually submitting your disagreeing votes pushes you both to engage more with the process and possibly confront your differences in values or maybe knowledge gaps that could influence decisions. Maybe this is uncomfortable but possibly healthier to confront these differences and talk or at least think about why they exist. It’s easy to just avoid talking or thinking about it if you just agree to disengage from the process because you aren’t in lockstep. Politics tends to be about more than just which team you like and is more a manifestation of your values in a way that might be less visible in day to day life, this is more true in these polarized times where there’s more differences than just a couple tenths of a percentage point in the tax rate in a given tax bracket, there’s actually some reflections of major value differences these days and maybe it’s good to engage with that even if neither of you change your mind rather than just avoiding thinking about it
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