That would indeed be something, and a reason to vote third-party--if only one other condition were met: having a reasonable certainty that the vote you cast for Jill Stein won't go to Donald Trump.
Yup, there's a fundamental fact of our election system that undermines all the standard ways we consider electoral strategies. With the proliferation of electronic voting machines and computerized tabulation systems, the electoral process is not only corrupted by all the influences leftists consistently criticize--the financial control of the plutocracy, media bias, unfair ballot laws, voter caging and suppression tactics, the two-party dupoloy, etc.--it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense: it gives the voter no reasonable assurance, and no way of ever knowing, that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought s/he did.
This is a new paradigm of electoral fraud that's metastasized since the 2000 election, and few have been willing to confront its radical implications. Liberals and leftists have been quite comfortable focusing on nasty election tactics that they can attribute to Republicans, but few have evinced much interest in the pedestrian details of computerized vote counting systems. And nobody wants to be tarred with the dreaded label: Conspiracy Theorist. Only when Hillary's electoral hijinks against Bernie in this year's primary became difficult to ignore did a wider swath or the left begin to pay sustained attention to the matter. But there's still a strong pull to keep the discussion focused on who's the lesser evil.
At this point, anyone, left or right, who professes concern for democracy, must give sustained attention to the integrity of the electoral system, and to the fact that we now have a voting system that is designed to enable wholesale fraud. Anybody who doubts this, should familiarize themselves with the work of people like the indefatigable Bev Harris of Black Box Voting , Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman , Steve Freeman , Jonathan Simon , and Virginia Martin (the election co-commissioner of Columbia County, NY, who has insisted on hand-counting votes), who have been working on this for years. Nine years ago, the film Hacking Democracy made the case clearly and irrefutably. I wrote about it in an essay on the 2012 election.
This year, the problem has finally gotten more attention on the left, and Victoria Collier's recent article on Truthout is a fine starting point for understanding how serious it is. To quickly and dramatically "get" what this means, if you haven't seen it already, please, please, watch this 8-minute excerpt from Hacking Democracy. In it, an optical-scan machine that Diebold executives testified, and election officials firmly believed, could not be hacked, is easily breached in front of those flabbergasted election workers--reducing one woman to tears, as she says, fully understanding what it means about American democracy: "It's as though our country is one country pretending to be another country."
It's as though that we have one election pretending to be another.
And third parties are now part of the pretense.
It is foolish to ignore how this electronic voting system affects what third-party voting might actually accomplish. There's no more need to stuff ballots when you can invisibly transfer electronic votes. Third-party votes are no longer just brave, if futile, markers of political difference; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed--precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine's prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 12% to 9%, or (more likely) 5% to 3%, of the vote, and Hillary or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory. Who's going to notice?
By the way, in considering whether Hillary or Donald would be the recipient of any such hackery, we should keep in mind that, while in 2000 and 2004 the voting machine companies were clearly associated with Bush, today, as a Stanford study(and here) of the primary vote notes: two of the three main voting machine companies are donors to the Clinton Foundation (also here). That may be one reason why the liberal Democratic media--MSNBC, The Nation, etc.--have not been hot on the trail of this fault in our democracy.
Consider how Hillary won the Democratic primary. She built up an insurmountable delegate advantage by winning with huge margins, early on, in the Southern states, outstripping her poll numbers in anomalous ways. In Louisiana, for example (according to the Stanford study), while the polls had her at 60%, she ended up with 71% of the vote, benefitting from anomalous results in 85% of the counties. Louisiana uses electronic voting machines that a Princeton study found to be easily hackable. It's not that Hillary "stole" those Southern states from Bernie: she would have won Louisiana anyway. But in a race where delegates were assigned proportionally, by increasing margins of victory by 11% in Louisiana and 12% (over Georgia exit polls) and 10% (Mississippi)--all with electronic voting--Hillary built up a delegate lead that Sanders could never overcome. As the Stanford study charts below illustrate, Hillary's advantage throughout the primary was in states without a paper trail, and she significantly beat her pre-elections polling numbers onlyin states without paper trails:
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