You have the option of voting for a third party candidate. They won't win, but over multiple election cycles this increases the odds that a third party could eventually present a credible alternative.
In most states the electoral college representatives are not meaningfully bound to the vote as popularly voted. It is more of a cast for a suggestion, and they have on many occasions voted a different way in the college which is the real vote for president.
The people that didn't vote don't count, figuratively or literally. You may as well have pointed out that only .1% of all mammals supported this, after accounting for dogs, cows, raccoons, mice...
Everyone who chose not to vote effectively removed themselves from the set of people to be counted as either supporting or not supporting this administration.
That's not actually how 'support' works, especially when 'the' alternative was committed to arming a genocidal apartheid regime against the will of their own voters. Many. many people can no longer stomach to 'hold their noses' and vote in favor of open atrocity.
There's a whole lot of people who strongly disdain both parties, on that basis and others. They are not remotely proportionally represented by either government or media, but they do exist and they don't support this administration.
Btw, there are all kinds of electoral solutions to the two party bind which you seem to have entirely accepted. Neither party will ever willingly bring those in.
… Do you think President is the only thing on the ballot? Do you think that maybe, if everyone voted, the demographics might be different?
I’m so tired of this nonsense. If y’all bothered showing up for state and local races, you could even change elections in your state. But that would like, take effort, so I get why you’d rather shitpost about how worthless it all is.
Ah, so by “not voting” you meant “leaving one box blank while already filling out the rest of the ballot because what’s the point of wasting the ink”?
Sorry, that reads, to me, like post hoc justification for nonsense. The only people who talk about voting not mattering are people who don’t vote - not people who skip one or two boxes on the form. Maybe you’re different.
Or you can be an adult and vote for the best option. Harris and the Democratic establishment are certainly not saints and I could rant for hours at how bad they are, but she was a competent woman and at least tried to float solutions to our problems as opposed to being a party of billionaires who is happy to burn it all down.
A lot of people see their vote for president like picking a team to be on and couldn't stomach being on either team.
I try to rephrase it for them: you're not picking a team, you're picking your OPPONENT. And who do you think you're going to have a better chance of even picking the battlegrounds against?
I think it's related to the frustratingly common idea that a person's political involvement begins and ends with voting. We really have to do a lot better at educating people about how political involvement can be an anytime thing, not just every four years. Successful lobbyists (and those who employ them) have long ago figured this out, we need to make sure the common person does, too!
Exactly this! I just don't understand how this is hard for otherwise competent people to grasp. The explanation I've used in the past is the choices are either being stabbed in the face or kicked in the balls. Ideally I'd not have either, but forced between one or the other I know which one I'd pick.
David Sedaris: “I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
I'm not sure who told you that casting a blank ballot represents a "protest vote", but I assure you that is not how our current voting system is set up.
To be clear, voting systems should have explicit options for protest votes; an explicit "I reject all candidates" option. Unfortunately, ours does not, by design; a blank ballot instead means "I endorse all candidates". Pretending otherwise will not change this.
Playing the tape to the end, what happens is the protest votes win? Start a new election cycle? What happens if that cycle now extends past the end of the current admin’s term which cause their time in office to extend beyond 2 terms? How do you then prevent the incumbent from using that to their advantage to stay in office?
Jeebus, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but dems the times we live in I guess.
I vote third parties. Blank counts as don't care, while a third party says I care and not you. When third parties get votes the majors pay attention less those third parties win.
I often am blank on things where I cannot find any information and so cannot have an imformed vote.
...which does just about as much as voting (that is, precious little).
If we're ever going to claw ourselves out of this (or any) mess, we need ranked choice or something like it. The giant douche / turd sandwich dichotomy needs to end, for everyone on any side of the political spectrum.
No matter what system of voting we use, unless we go back to only white landowning men can vote or something (doubt we want to do that), you can’t avoid the fact that 160 million+ people vote together for President.
The most viable solution looks less like changing to ranked choice and more like returning more governing power to lower levels of government (state and local) where there is less competition
Wait, though. It's not that there are too many voters. It's that the system of voting we use doesn't connect the vox populi to the means of social control.
If you're given the choice between two bad options, you aren't really given the choice. There's massive cross-aisle support for a lot of things (proper healthcare, more support for working families, lower inflation, holding the banks to some kind of standard, reducing corruption, etc.) that we could actually move the needle on if our votes mattered, but because the two parties have us between a rock (whoever we identify as our party) and a hard place (whoever the other guys are) it doesn't really matter who we vote for.
Now, I'm willing to concede that what you're talking about might be a thing, but there's really no way to know until we actually fix what we have and see if that becomes a problem. We've never really tried what we're supposed to have in the modern era.
Frankly, I'd like to see some format of direct democracy rather than representative. Always seemed a little like an obvious grift to me.
If you want to change the way voting works in the US (and oh boy do I), you first must win an election in the current system to gain enough power to do that.
So many american leftists just seem to ignore that and it makes things very difficult.
Not quite so, ballot initiatives are actually the best bet. They've been successful in local politics primarily so far, but the initial results are promising (1).
You're right, that the closer you get to that core of federal power the more resistance you come up against, but once there's a powerful enough popular groundswell (that is I suppose, and if and not a when) you can move to mass protests, general strikes, guillotines, etc. This is why it's important to talk about, esp. around those who don't really know about it yet.
> You could consider spoiling your ballot instead?
No. Either vote for one of the third party candidates (doesn't much matter which one), or vote write-in for a fictional character or "none of the above" or something.
Ballots are generally counted as long as they're legible. Voters aren't required to pick a candidate in every race, they can leave some blank. And in most states there were third party candidates listed as well.
