Throwing Away Your Vote, and Loving It

I had this Inconvenient Truth-style "hockey stick" graph which I whipped up in Excel and Photoshop, the day before yesterday, but Photoshop went like super frozen on me, so I couldn't access it until I just decided to cancel the operation on it and work from the recovery file. It's finished now. And it's pretty darn glorious (I wish I had a scissor lift right now...)

Nevada is super awesome for having the "None of These Candidates" option, and I'm surprised it's the only state in the union that allows voters to literally throw their votes away (or at least, more literally than when they vote third party.) It's for when not even the third party candidates are good enough. Voting for either (third party or just plain nobody) is making a statement (so stop with the rhetoric already?). Some people in other states just skip the question altogether when they would have voted for nobody had the formal option been available to them; this option allows you to quantify that. A full 2.6% of Nevada voters who cast their ballots this year voted for the option, which is the highest percentage ever, so far; the closest to it was a full 40 years ago, when the option was available for the first time.

Among those 28,824 voters this year was, probably not a big surprise, yours truly. For what it's worth. Also for what it's worth, and to put my voting decisions so far into context: I cast my vote in for Romney back in '12, with my literal actual given reason being that voting for Obama was "too mainstream." Probably says a lot about me. I don't know.