I voted by mail - first time in Illinois that anyone could do it this year. We also have early voting. Add to that the fact our polls open earlier than most other states, and there's pretty much no excuse not to vote in IL.
I understand that a lot of people are frustrated with the candidates and the political discourse right now. Almost everyone I voted for in the primary lost, so these are not the candidates I would have picked. The thing is, some of the people that are up for election right now are going to be in office whether we like it or not. Government is going to continue, and it's going to continue affecting our lives whether we like it or not. It's in our best interest to vote, even if it is only for the candidate that we dislike the least.
I'll let you in on a secret: no one cares if you don't vote. The candidates that win today don't think about the fact their 55% victory only represents 37% of the population. When politicians govern, non-voters might as well not exist. Sure, you matter before the election, because maybe they can get you to turn into a voter. After the election, if you didn't vote you're a nobody. You may think that not voting is a way of showing your displeasure, but I'm telling you: if you don't vote,
no one cares.
If you really don't want to vote for either major party candidate, pick a third party candidate. Those votes matter much more than non-votes. They represent people who came out to vote and explicitly chose not to vote for either option. I voted for quite a few third party candidates this year.
I'd encourage you not to vote for ALL third party candidates though. The fact is, there are some races where your vote matters much more than others. In a perfect world we wouldn't have the spoiler effect, but here in the real world the United States uses one of the worst election methods there is (called
plurality voting), and the spoiler effect is very real. If a race is close - for example, the governor's race in Illinois - then voting for a third party candidate may not be in your best interest. It certainly wasn't in the best interest of Florida voters who clearly would have preferred Al Gore over George Bush in 2000.*
Here in Illinois, we have an incumbent governor who is a genuinely good person with good ideas but a terrible leader and politician, a extremist challenger who believes he can fix one of the worst state economies in the country through budget cuts alone - but won't go into any specifics about how he'd do it until after the election, an independent who doesn't pay child support, used steroids, and beat up his hooker girlfriend, and a Green party candidate who isn't that bad but has no chance of winning.
Our choices this year suck. In 2006, I voted for the Green party candidate (same one, this is his second time running) because I didn't want to vote for Blagojevich or Judy Baar Topinka. Blagojevich was certain to win, so I didn't even need to think about what consequences my third party vote might have. This year, however, the election is looking to be extremely close, and my vote is statistically more important in this governor's race than most others. With such a close race, it's important to look at the candidates that have a shot at winning and assess which one you'd prefer. Even if you dislike them both, I guarantee you there's one you like more than the other. In close races, it's important to vote for that candidate because, again, one of them is going to win whether you like it or not. It's in your best interest to make sure it's the better person of the two.
Finally, the dissatisfaction so many of us feel with the political system has nothing to do with the candidates themselves. Most of them are actually decent people. Rather, there are two major issues: 1) Our plurality voting system doesn't assure us that voting our conscience won't cause our least favorite candidate to win, and 2) most of us feel like politicians represent lobbyists instead of people. Democracy isn't just something that happens every 2 years in November. If you're dissatisfied with the state of American politics - like so many of us are - then you need to participate MORE, not less. If you want to be able to comfortably vote your conscience, write your representatives and urge them to support instant runoff voting (the easiest improvement we could make to our voting system). If you're annoyed that politicians on both sides seem to represent donors and lobbyists more than their constituents, join the movement to
fix congress first.
The one thing you can do that is guaranteed NOT to make anything better (and, in fact, will likely contribute to making all these things worse) is not vote.
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*Please note that while I encourage voters to think about the unintended consequences of their vote, that does not mean I don't believe candidates have the right to run. I don't hold it against Ralph Nader that we got stuck with George Bush, but it's very difficult to argue that George Bush would have won had Ralph Nader not run.