The Volokh Conspiracy

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

About The Volokh Conspiracy Editorial Independence Who we are Books Volokh Daily Email Archives Search DMCA RSS

Democracy

The Logic of Voting for a Lesser Evil - and Other Writings on the Ethics of Voting

Compendium of links to some of my writings on the morality of voting.

Ilya Somin | 11.2.2026 11:25 PM

Sauron - an example of a greater evil you can vote for a lesser evil to avoid. (NA)

Tomorrow is election day. And - to put it mildly many of the options before voters are far from wonderful.  In all too many races, the candidates with a realistic chance of winning are all bad. This situation, like other recent elections, raises difficult questions about such issues as whether people have a duty to vote, whether it is permissible to vote for a badly flawed candidate if the alternative is even worse, and how to balance competing issues in making voting decisions.

I've written about these kinds of issues in some detail, previously, and this post links and and summarizes some of those writings. This is not a post about which candidate you should vote for in any given race. I've already written a post about why - in most cases - the Democrats are the lesser evil in races for federal offices this year (state and local elections are often a different matter). I've also written about why libertarians (like me) should seek political alliances with "abundance liberals" and why the previous "fusionist" alliance with conservatives probably cannot and should not be revived in the near future.

This post doesn't argue for any particular voting choice, but rather compiles pieces about  how we should make such decisions in general - and whether we should make them at all. Much of the post is adapted from a similar one I put up in 2024. Unless otherwise noted, these pieces were all published right here at the VC blog:

1. "The Logic of Voting for a Lesser Evil"

This post was inspired by the 2016 election, but almost all of it remains relevant today. In it, I explain why it is both permissible and desirable to vote for the lesser evil in an election where all of the viable options are bad. I address a variety of counterarguments, including claims that voting for a lesser evil makes you morally complicit in that candidate's wrongdoing, arguments that it's better to cast a "protest vote" for a candidate that has no chance of winning, arguments based on the very low probability that your vote will be decisive, and more. Here's a brief excerpt:

Imagine an election where the only options are Queen Cersei from Game of Thrones, and Sauron, the Dark Lord from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. If Cersei wins, she will kill many innocent people, and oppress others. But she will leave much of the population more or less alone (as long as they don't openly oppose her or threaten her family in any way). If Sauron wins, he will kill far more innocent people, and make the survivors his slaves.

You can instead cast a protest vote for a vastly better alternative, such as Gandalf….. But, by assumption, these are purely symbolic options, because they have zero chance of prevailing. If the protest voter would otherwise have backed Cersei, the net effect of his decision to protest is to increase the likelihood of the worst possible outcome: the triumph of Sauron.

Under those........

© Reason.com