To End Vote-Shaming, Rethink What’s Important in Elections

The validity of an election is not in the end-result. It’s not a mathematical expression of how many voters voted for the ultimate winner. It’s an expression of voters having the ability to freely choose a candidate on their terms.

We’ve reached the part of the primary cycle where, in a media-fueled panic over the possibility of a brokered convention, poorer-performing candidates are feeling the pressure to drop out and throw their support behind their more successful counterparts.

This is an effect not unique to this primary, nor to primaries in general. Third-party candidates and intransigents within the major parties perpetually experience the wrath of the major party apparatchiks: their refusal to fall behind the front-runner represents a threat to electoral success.

This kind of belligerence was used extensively during the 2016 election. Members of the right-wing electorate were routinely told that a vote for conscience and against some of the more unseemly behaviors of Donald Trump was akin to treason because, allegedly, a vote against Donald Trump was a vote for Hillary Clinton. A similar rationale was also exercised on members of the left-wing electorate.

But the American electoral system is not closed in this manner. The idea that a vote for one candidate…