Vote The Protest

• archive
• 2015-2016

Vote The Protest was a campaign I ran in 2015-2016, encouraging non-voters to vote in order to use their vote as a protest by not voting for a serious candidate. It was aimed squarely at the status-quo, and shamelessly promoted the idea that anything would be better. The campaign predates Donald Trump's entry into the race, but he would end up capatilizing on the public sentiment that caused me to believe that this campaign was worthwhile. Activities involved social media blitzes, press releases and efforts to recruit non-politicians to run for office.

The campaign started during an examination of voter data for the last several presidential elections at the time. It rapidly becams clear that if all of the people that were eligible to vote but usually didn't all cast there vote for a candiate, they could outvote both the Republicans and the Democrats by a long shot. In our two party system, the perception most people have is that it is roughly half the population deciding on the government.

It is not true. In most elections, the "winning" faction represents between 15-18 percent of the population when you include non-voters. If our system of elections was reasonable, and fostered ballots with a range of viable choices presented on an equal footing, I could admonish the non-voter. But we don't have that. What we have is more akin to Three Card Monte. It seems unfair to blame people that don't want to play. But whatever you believe about people that choose not to vote, the fact remains that what is considered a majority in our system is actually far from that.

I viewed this realtity as a potential key to breaking the death grip that the career political class has in American society. It was actually a non-political movement in that the target was politics itself. Unrealistic? Perhaps. But I felt that something had to be tried, so I tried this.

One side effect of the campaign is this website. LOGGIAonFIRE actually started life as the Vote The Protest newsletter. When the campaign concluded, the site moved to this URL, and was rebranded as LoggiaOnFire Magazine. The oldest articles in the Thoughts section were actually first published under the Vote The Protest banner.

The campaign never grew very large, and at its peak I had a few people helping me. While we didn't gain national attention, there were a few successes and the time was well spent. Many of the things I learned running Vote The Protest would be leveraged during the political campaigns I was later involved in.