Is a 3rd party vote "thrown away"? Different perspective.

[StopThief]

Nader in '04!
By Keith Burgess-Jackson

The silly season -- i.e., the 2004 presidential campaign -- is upon us, so let me provide a public service by helping you spot (and encouraging you to disregard) a particularly insidious but strangely alluring argument. It is an argument that you will hear and read many times in the next fifteen months. It is an argument that even intelligent, well-educated people find appealing. But it is a bad argument.
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The problem with the thrown-away vote argument is that it rests on a false assumption. Saying that you throw your vote away if you vote for Nader, Buchanan, or some other third-party candidate implies that you do not throw your vote away if you vote for one of the other (major-party) candidates. The concept of throwing a vote away makes sense, in other words, only if the concept of not throwing a vote away makes sense. This is what we need to explore.

In what sense, if any, does one not throw one's vote away if one votes for Gore or Bush? It might be said that since, realistically speaking, one of them is going to win the election, one does not throw one's vote away by voting for either of them. But this is strange. Does one's voting for either of them make a difference to the outcome? Paul Meehl has estimated that the chance of one's vote making a difference in a national election is one in one hundred million -- about the same as one's chance of being killed on the way to the polling place. (See Paul E. Meehl, "The Selfish Voter Paradox and the Thrown-Away Vote Argument," The American Political Science Review 71 : 11-30.)

More here:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-080403C

Makes sense to me. Any thoughts?