Vote Your Conscience does not necessarily equal Vote Responsibly. Voting for someone with no realistic chance of winning pulls a vote away from someone who does have a chance to win.
I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: Voting your conscience
***IS*** voting responsibly. Neither of the Big Two candidates own my vote - and neither of them have done one frakking thing to earn it. Since a vote for the (R) candidate tells the RNC, "Yes, I'm COMPLETELY HAPPY with not only the direction your party has taken this country in, but with ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING the current candidate has ever done.", and a vote for the (D) candidate sends the same message to the DNC, what's that leave for someone who does NOT believe that the Big Two have ANYTHING worthwhile to offer the country between them?
Then you have a very real chance of the single worst candidate being the winner even though a huge majority of voters didn't vote for them. Clinton's second term is a perfect example of that. Clinton won even though 56.36% of the voting public did NOT vote for him. All because H. Ross Perot, who had about as much chance of winning as Mickey Mouse, pulled in 18.91% of the vote. If even half the people who voted for him had voted for Bush, Bush would have won by a comfortable 4% margin.
So, yes, voting for someone who doesn't have a chance of winning IS throwing away your vote. And it's a slap in the face to those who vote realistically. Even though they have a candidate they much prefer, they know there are only two who have a chance at winning, and they know that one of those candidates WILL be the winner no matter how much they wish otherwise. So they do the responsible thing. They vote for the candidate who, in their view, will have the least negative impact on the country. It is neither pleasant nor enjoyable. It is, however, real life.
Brad
Thanks to the circular reasoning you present, we'll never HAVE any valid challengers to the Big Two, will we?
And as a result, we get to wonder why we always have such morons, idiots, and would-be-tyrants elected to office - well, it's because thanks to "voting for the lesser of two evils", THAT'S WHAT THEY THINK WE WANT! Keep voting for the same sort of jerks all the time, you'll keep GETTING the same sort of jerks all the time.
Anyone insisting that I "owe" my vote to any particular politician, for the best of reasons or for any reason at all - well, I think you know where you can stick it.
Brad, you may consider this the slap to your face you mentioned in your post.