[Ilya Somin] The logic of voting for a lesser evil

Sauron – a greater evil worth paying a price to avoid.

If you are reading this, you might be one of the many Americans who are facing the prospect of voting for a lesser evil in this year’s presidential election. That prospect is painful. But there is nothing inherently wrong with making such a choice. Indeed, in many situations, it is likely the right thing to do.

Imagine an election where the only options are Queen Cersei from Game of Thrones, and Sauron, the Dark Lord from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. If Cersei wins, she will kill many innocent people, and oppress others. But she will leave much of the population more or less alone (as long as they don’t openly oppose her or threaten her family in any way). If Sauron wins, he will kill far more innocent people, and make the survivors his slaves.

Queen Cersei – a lesser evil than Sauron.

You can instead cast a protest vote for a vastly better alternative, such as Gandalf or Daenerys Targaryen. But, by assumption, these are purely symbolic options, because they have zero chance of prevailing. If the protest voter would otherwise have backed Cersei, the net effect of his decision to protest is to increase the likelihood of the worst possible outcome: the triumph of Sauron.

Under those circumstances, it seems clear that a person who ensures a Cersei victory has done a good deed. He or she will have saved large numbers of people from slavery or death, even though the Cersei regime would be a deeply unjust one.

I. The Complicity Objection.

The most obvious objection to this line of reasoning is that you should not vote for Cersei because doing so makes you morally complicit in her evil actions. If you instead protest vote or stay home, you can remain untainted.

The complicity argument is intuitively plausible. But it is not as strong as it may seem. The voter in question is not responsible for creating the sad situation in which Cersei and Sauron are the only options. The net effect of his or her actions is a positive one: less death and slavery. And his intent is also good. He is not motivated by a desire to help Cersei commit atrocities. To the contrary, he abhors them, and is only voting for Cersei to avoid still greater evil. Sadly, the only way to do so is to ensure that Cersei wins.

You can still reject this line of reasoning if you think it is never justifiable to back any evil at all, no matter how great a good is created by doing so. That’s a logically consistent worldview. But it requires adherents to bite a lot of bullets that few would actually accept. For example, it implies that everyone who backed the Allies during World War II was wrong to do so. After all, the allied governments (even the liberal democratic ones) were far from being paragons of virtue, and their triumph involved many injustices, such as the racist internment of Japanese-Americans. The same goes for supporting the American Revolution or the Union side in the Civil War, both of which were also far from morally pure causes. If supporting a lesser evil in war is sometimes defensible, surely the same applies to an election.

II. Does it Matter if your Vote Has Very Little Chance of Mattering?

A more subtle objection to voting for a lesser evil is the claim that you should not do so because the chance that your vote will make a difference is extremely low. Libertarian writer Jeffrey Singer explains the idea well:

1) According to Professor Ilya Somin in Democracy and Political Ignorance, my vote has, on average, a roughly 1 in 60 million chance of being the decisive vote in the Presidential election. (It might be a great as 1 in 10 million in my relatively small state of Arizona. It would have a roughly 1 in a billion chance of being decisive if I lived in California.)

2) If I vote for the lesser of evils and hold my nose, my vote is blended in with millions of others—there is no way to register my dissatisfaction with the choices the two major parties have given me. There is no wa