Ralph Nader stealing votes

Blaming Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s defeat by George W. Bush is an issue that will probably never go away.  It came up again a few weeks ago in the Letters section.

The figures below for the 2000 election are from www.electproject.org/2000g and Wikipedia “Spoiler Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

In 2000, Florida had a voting-eligible population of 10,666,193.  5,963.110 ballots were cast for a Presidential candidate.  Ralph Nader received 97,421 of those votes.  That was only 2.07% of the no-shows, not much above those who didn’t even vote for a Presidential candidate, 1.6%!!!

We can only guess how the no-shows would have voted.

I would say that we had something similar with the 2016 election.  Turnout for the Presidential vote was 59.3%.  How would the 40.7% who didn’t show up have voted?  We really didn’t know.

It is too true for election after election:

The only way
To throw your vote away
Is to stay away.

Remember to vote for local offices on November 7.  The local results often affect us more directly than the national elections.

Published in Reader Weekly, 2017-10-23 (as far as I can tell, letters are not published online).

For a deeper analysis, see https://www.truthdig.com/articles/dont-fall-for-it-the-nader-myth-and-your-2016-vote/.