Come election season, citizens should inform themselves, they should listen to the arguments of all the candidates, they should think things through as best they can, and then they should get out and vote.

Maybe the vote won’t count for much, but if too many found refuge in that excuse, the democratic experiment would quickly shrivel. Maybe it can be the case that neither candidate seems worth a hoot, but knowing that even slight differences can have major consequences, isn’t it still our duty to seek out particularities, make a choice and confirm it at the polls?

Most of us would surely say yes, but what if you have the first election in presidential history in which each major party candidate is worse than the other?

Clearly, that’s a paradoxical proposition, but for every shudder some of us have in thinking of Donald Trump as president, there is an equally heartfelt shudder in thinking of Hillary Clinton as president. It’s as if you had to choose between consuming one of two poisons, knowing that either one will kill you and that each has its own peculiar, unendurable pains.

The case against Trump is just about everything about him. He knows nothing about government or issues and has not tried to learn. He struggles to get through a sentence. He is crude and lewd. He has a history of bad judgment and uncaring acts. He has the intemperate quality of a man who never grew up, except maybe sexually. He would torture suspected terrorists and kill their families. He makes genital jokes in a nationally televised debate. He lies incessantly.

The two best arguments for him are that he is not Hillary Clinton and has been almost reasonable when actually heeding his best advisers. He did it for a couple of weeks, quit and is doing it again in the homestretch instead of heeding his usual scatterbrained impulses.

But how long will it last? And even at his best, as just one example of his ineradicable confusion, he talks about getting rid of Common Core, either not understanding it is a state program or figuring on an eradication of states rights.

The case for Clinton: she is wondrously intelligent, immensely well-informed and as experienced as experienced gets. The case against: she employs these attributes to the detriment of the American people, sometimes as a consequence of ideological inanity, but also just to win votes. She has plans to spend us into oblivion and regulate us into oppression. She would fill any vacancies on the increasingly powerful Supreme Court with lefties who say boo to the Constitution and could then give us 30 years of oligarchical madness.

Don’t forget, either, that Clinton’s character is best summed up by her seeming to have none. The emails and the misuse of the Clinton Foundation are examples of that, but the evidence goes back decades. Political consequences are doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons and subjecting this nation to peril.

Not voting for one of the candidates in a race, we are told, is in effect to vote for the other one. Fine. By not voting for Clinton, I am voting for Trump, but by not voting for him, I am voting for her. The votes cancel each other out.

What I am going to do is write in the name of House Speaker Paul Ryan and vote for Republican candidates for Congress. A GOP-controlled House and Senate could thwart the worst of Clinton, still likely to be elected despite Trump’s rise in the polls. Stalemate might occasionally occur, but stalemate can be better than overreaching legislation and she will likely be a more capable negotiator than President Obama while Ryan knows how to compromise intelligently.

Four years from now, let’s have an election choosing the better of the good.

Jay Ambrose is a columnist with Tribune News Service.