The election issue of The American Conservative includes a short piece in which I argue for writing in Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater Jr. rather than voting for any of the major- or minor-party candidates for president. Today I followed through on my own advice, casting an absentee ballot in Virginia. Writing-in a vote turns out to be easy: there’s an on-screen prompt that allows you to call up a touchscreen keyboard. The only problem is that the keyboard is not QWERTY — it’s purely alphabetical, which to is utterly disconcerting to people who know how to type.

The inconvenience of hunting and pecking to write-in Paul and Goldwater led me to disregard my own advice further down the ballot. Rather than writing in Pat Buchanan for Senate, I went ahead and voted for Bill Redpath, the Libertarian candidate, and I voted for the Independent Green, whoever it was, for Virginia’s 8th District Congressional seat. (I did, however, write in Mr. Buchanan for the Arlington School Board. There were only two candidates running for two seats, and I wasn’t about to approve of either of them.) As I say in my TAC article, there’s nothing wrong with symbolic voting — it’s symbolic organizing that libertarians and traditional conservatives ought to stay away from.

Why vote at all, when your ballot is statistically worthless? I vote because it feels good to check “No” next to every bond issue, tax hike, and referendum to increase government power. My vote isn’t decisive even in those municipal questions, which of course have a much smaller electorate, but the more people who vote to oppose further government debt and spending, the better the odds that those measures will fail, as they should. And even if they don’t, it’s psychologically pleasant to say “No” to taxes and spending.