My Vote For President

After being bounced back and forth between two different precincts for an hour and a half (thank you, Chicago Board of Elections, for screwing much of Chicago by changing our polling places....but not notifying us by mail, updating it on your website, or educating most of your election judges about it), I was able to cast my ballot. Including local and state elections, my total ballot went 50% for Republican Party candidates, 25% for Democratic Party candidates, and 12.5% each for the Libertarian Party and Green Party. Thus, roughly 63% for center-right candidates, and 38% for center-left candidates. That's on par with my typical vote split.

Falling on the moderate-libertarian-conservative section of the ideological scale, I often have to straddle my fiscally conservative views with my socially moderate ones. Since I became eligible to vote in 1988, I have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate three times (1988, 1992, and 1996), the Libertarian presidential candidate once (2000), the Republican presidential candidate once (2004), and left the presidential slot blank on my ballot one cycle because I was dissatisfied with every single candidate on the list (2008). So who did I vote for this morning?

Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party 

Mr. Johnson probably would've been my choice in the Republican presidential primary, had the nominee (Mitt Romney) not been pretty much decided by the time that Illinois got to weigh in on the matter. As a result, I instead voted in the Democratic primary earlier this year.

Obviously, I'm no fan of Barack Obama so I immediately dismissed voting for him. No, I am not better now than I was four years ago. The government deficit is also way out of control under Obama, he has often refused to work across party lines to get things done (contrary to his campaign vow), and the promised transparency never materialized. He  flagrantly ignored black voters' concerns while bending over backwards for gay voters and Hispanic voters.

While the Constitution Party's Virgil Goode and I agree on many fiscal issues, he is much too socially conservative for my taste.

I thought long and hard about whether I should vote for Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson. If I lived in a battleground state instead of the firmly pro-Obama state of Illinois, I likely would have held my nose and voted for Romney because my distaste for Obama's failed policies rank higher. However, since Obama will win Illinois' 20 electoral votes regardless of my vote, I decided to vote my conscience. I conclude that based on what Romney has done in his political career and not what comes out of his mouth with the changing winds, he is policy-wise not much better (although still better) than Obama.  While he has policy differences with Obama, they are merely differences of degree and not kind. Both Obama and Romney are two Big Government peas in a pod (Romney slightly less so), so neither of them appeal to me. Should Romney win the presidency, the center-right will be disappointed by him...a lot. He changes his position too much, and his tenure as Massachusetts' governor shows that his commitment to limited government principles is dubious at best.

In this election cycle, Gary Johnson best fits the pro-liberty label. He has a firm limited-government record to back up his talk. Johnson has demonstrated his commitment to liberty during his two terms as New Mexico governor: holding the line on government spending and taxes, educational choice, and his opposition to the War on Drugs (which should be one of Black America's biggest issues, given how many folks is has ensnared for mere drug possession). I agree with his positions on balancing budgets and the Federal Reserve.

We disagree on some foreign policy issues, on illegal immigration, and I wouldn't cut military spending quite as much as he would (he proposes a 43% reduction, I'd do about 20%) but overlap so much that I felt very comfortable casting my ballot for him this morning.

I'm not convinced by those of you who have argued on Booker Rising's social media websites that a vote for a third party candidate is a vote for Obama, a "wasted" vote, or that I should "vote for the lesser of two evils". Perhaps it can be argued that I'm denying Romney an opportunity to best Obama in the popular vote category. Fair enough. However, I remain unconvinced that Romney won't ideologically cave when the going gets tough. In my opinion, both Obama and Romney are political poison. Transformational political change needs to happen in America, and we're not going to get it from either of the major political parties for president if we keep voting for them.