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. The argument is that, by voting for a third-party presidential candidate, such as Ralph Nader or Patrick Buchanan, you are throwing your vote away. Since a vote is a valuable...