Bonus question: How many troll accounts do you thing will stop posting too?
I asked someone which third party candidate they think I should vote for in a thread where they were saying third party is the only anti-genocide vote. Six hours later and I still don’t have an answer. It’s so disingenuous.
They’re using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s time tested and it works.
If you want to end the war in Gaza, vote Harris.
If you want to accelerate it until everyone is dead and the war ends faster, vote Trump, 3rd party, or abstain.
It’s really that simple.
I mean it’s a genocide, not a war. And Harris absolutely has not said she would cease arming Isreal, she is less outspoken than Biden but there is no indication she would end anything.
But Trump gave gift after gift to Isareal the first time and has said he would send more armaments. He without question would make things worse so Harris is the only sane ethical choice.
I agree it’s a simple choice but we need to be realistic that Harris isn’t some peace panacea.
Outside America, many of us really wish you guys would just stop and consider the importance of your election beyond this single issue of the Middle East. Seriously. There’s only so much the USA can do about that, anyway.
Much, much more important is the signal you would send by re-electing an obvious wannabe dictator who has already tried to steal an election. Like it or not, for two centuries America has been the world’s model for openness, democracy, freedom. In the last decade those things have taken a serious hit around the world, and the connection is obvious with Trump’s first election. Democracy and its associated blessings - rule of law, unpoliticized civil service and institutions, press freedom etc - are really fragile. If America gives up on them it’s permission for everyone else to do so, and that’s going to lead the world to some very bad places. The Gaza issue is a complete sideshow by comparison.
I’ll answer for them. Anyone pushing the view points on the matters you desire. A vote for third party is better than not voting at all, as people will just lump you in with people who can’t be bothered to vote otherwise.
That said what matters most is the down ballot. Look up the candidate that most align with your views and vote for them.
Straight-line Democrat it is, then!
I would say, whichever one is polling highest, who has signaled support in any way for the issue. Other things about them don’t matter because they aren’t going to win anyway. In this case a lot of third party votes for a single candidate are probably better than the same number of votes spread across different candidates because it looks more like an organized voting block to politicians looking at the numbers in retrospect, who are the reason to vote at all if you are voting third party, you are trying to communicate via those numbers about how your vote can be obtained or lost.
There is no viable condidate.
If you are doing a protest vote, write in george carlin.
they may stop pushing a phony, failed candidate, but they’ll start-in with lies and other bullshit instead.
Russia still has a war to win. It will not stop.
Third party votes are protest votes in a sense. They’ll still be there, they’ll just protest in other ways.
Are these other ways just as constructive as pissing their vote away…?
Depends on if you pay attention or care for what they’re protesting.
Better protest vote than Trump at least
It’s the same picture.
I voted third party for my congressional rep. I have the privilege of living in a solid blue district and I did it is a protest, but also because I like the candidate more than the blue candidate. I voted for my favored candidate in the primary, but she lost to a heavily AIPAC funded candidate. I disagree with Israel’s actions and the amount of foreign money in domestic elections. I’ve told very few people this, whether in person or online - more than anything I want it to represent statistical dissent. I would never consider my vote if there were an even remote possibility of the right winger taking the seat.
Foreign money in US elections is illegal. Is AIPAC money coming from Israel? Seems doubtful, as a lot of money flows from the US to Israel already.
That is true. I say this because there is money that flows in through intermediaries(though still illegal, undoubtedly happens), but I also incorrectly conflated monetary support for foreign interests with money from foreign entities - my apology.
American jews give aipac a veneer but make no mistake it is a foreign agent.
Foreign money in US elections used to be illegal. A law that isn’t getting enforced isn’t a real law.
Voting for a third party in a majoritarian electoral system is functionally the same as abstaining. A majoritarian system is intended to produce a binary choice. And this situation is not “undemocratic” if the two parties are internally democratic, with factions and primaries and so on.
Here in Europe we have mostly PR systems with lots of parties in the final round - and we still have voters who whine that nothing’s good enough for them. Here they sometimes campaign for official recognition of blank votes, as if that would solve anything.
Personally I’m in favor of the proposition by which, if you abstain or vote blank, your name gets put onto a special lottery ballot and you risk finding yourself personally elected. Seems appropriate. After all, apparently these people think they can do better than everyone else.
You’re not mentioning the biggest reason for this: First Past the Post.
We have two corrupt parties in the US. A literal sham of a democracy. The UK has FPTP too and it shows. They’ll lose NHS pretty soon because of it.
I did mention it, “majoritarian” means FPTP.
My point is that this system is not necessarily undemocratic, and indeed that it can even be too democratic. It all depends on the internal setup of the two parties. The Republican party is definitely a “sham of a democracy” in that it has too much of it. In Sweden no Trump figure can take over the government because the parties will stop him. In the USA in the past, the Republican party would have served the same purpose.
They’re both sham parties you strangely disingenuous fascist
The internal setup of the two parties is that
THEY ARE PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE NOT SUBJECT TO FEDERAL ELECTION LAWS AND THEREFORE THEIR PRIMARIES ARE ACTUALLY LITERALLY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SHAMS THAT PRETEND TO BE UNBIASED WHILE ADMITTING TO BEING BIASED IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS WHERE THEIR INTEGRITY WAS CALLED INTO QUESTION.
The two parties aren’t democratic though. More so the Democrats who have a primary where the party still ultimately decides the winner with super delegates.
This is where is gets more complicated. To pol-sci specialists of authoritarian breakdown, American parties are in fact too democratic. The smoke-filled-room elitism of super delegates, and so on, has historically been a very good way to stop demagogues gaming the system. The essential reason you guys are having to suffer Trump is that the Republican party couldn’t stop him. The party had become an empty shell, a brand waiting to be taken over by whatever unscrupulous demagogue could win its primary. The Democrats, with their supposedly undemocratic super-delegates, are at this point America’s only genuine political party. It’s not a bug that the DNC leadership can assert a direction as you suggest, it’s a feature.
This person is such a fascist that they’re pretending anti-democratic cheating is a “feature of democracy”.
Chill. Your arguments would be more persuasive that way.
That last paragraph doesn’t work in a secret ballot system.
It would require a separate nominative register for the blank votes, sure. But the whiners complain that they are unheard. This solves that. If you want your “no preference” added up and counted, then sure, but you have to be ready to be elected yourself. Seems fair to me. Democracy does not work without participation. People who opt out are effectively voting against democracy and they should own that fact.
There is absolutely no situation in which I would be okay with one of these people being in a leadership position. They’ve proven that they can’t be bothered to do the basic citizen’s duty of caring about politics enough to cast a vote at all, and you want to put them in charge of operating the government? No.
So at what point does low turnout become a problem, and how would you propose to fix that? The system we have depends on people voting and running for election. For every additional person who opts out, the legitimacy of the elected politicians falls, the scope of what they can get done is narrowed, and the relative voice of those who do vote becomes louder - these people typically being richer and more powerful already. It’s a problem. Forcing citizens to take responsibility is one solution.
No. They will continue to ramble on and on about how “both parties are the same”, and bitch about the person who won. A 3rd party can never win in the USA without changing the electoral system.
I sure as fuck hope we end up with the president who will make those cosplaying MAGAs continue to whine.
This is the most succinct answer.
I think a good measure of whether something is moral is to imagine everyone doing it and consider if it would make the world a better or worse place.
In the U.S., most people probably don’t vote for a third party because they assume no one else will, so they worry their vote will be wasted. It’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma: if you vote and no one else does, you lose, but if everyone voted, everyone would benefit.
So, if someone does choose to vote third party, was it the right thing to do? Well, what if every voter acted this way? There’s a good chance the third party could win, and while it’s debatable, it’s reasonable to assume they might be a better choice than the other two.
Ranked-choice voting would solve this issue, by the way.
Yeah, but then, if, say 20% of voters in swing states voted third party, it would let the greater evil in, this being the very immoral choice.
Surely a more relevant measure is what can I do that will do the most good. Voting for someone who is better than the other realistic option, this keeping extremists out of power feels like a more moral option than making a pointless vote.
say 20% of voters in swing states voted third party, it would let the greater evil in
Not in the case of ranked choice voting. If the 3rd party candidate doesn’t win the vote goes to the number two choice.
Also, sometimes the lesser evil is still evil. Imagine if the vote was between Trump and literal Hitler.
Yeah, but ranked choice isn’t in operation, so you’ve got to make the better choice for right now.
Also, in that case Trump would be the better option. I would hope that in a scenario where the republicans had nominated Hitler that the democrats could do better than Trump but if they couldn’t, then yes, voting for Trump in that scenario would be r the right thing to do as voting for, say, Bernie Sanders I. that scenario would let, you know, Hitler become the President.
As a non-US citizen, I’m getting the impression that a big number of left-wing voters are voting for Kamala not because she’s so great, but because she’s not Trump. Similarly, a ton of republicans are voting for Trump because they consider it a vote for the party, not for the candidate, and they sure are not going to vote for a democrat because (insert stereotypical grievances about liberals.)
To me, it seem reasonable to assume, that given the chance, there would be a ton of people on both sides that would rather give their vote to almost anyone else but either of these two, but they don’t because they know that a 3rd party can’t win and this would just risk the greater or two evils winning.
Why I referenced the prisoner’s dilemma is because I mostly see this as a coordination problem. What if instead of tactical voting, everyone just voted for the candidate they actually consider the best one? It’s not at all obvious to me that this would still mean that either of the two main candidates would win. This could very well give rise to a 3rd party.
Also, to return to my original point; it doesn’t seem immoral to me to vote for 3rd party even if that causes Trump to win by one vote. You did the right thing, rest of the people didn’t. If everyone acted like you, it seems to be that this would, in fact, lead to him not winning.
RCV doesn’t “solve” the issue though. The fact that third party candidates can sway elections to the least preferred candidate is known as the “Spoiler effect”, and RCV is also subject to it.
RCV seems to be objectively better than plurality (what we use now), but it and any other ranking-based voting system are still subject to spoilers. One thing that can actually “solve” the issue though is rating-based systems, like Approval Voting, Score Voting, or STAR voting.
One party favors RCV much more than the other. I know who I’m voting for.
How considerate of them. I don’t expect the whiney asses who’ve been bitching and lying for the last eight years to stop regardless of who wins. What will they do without their core personality trait?
I’m probably going to leave after the election results are known for sure (note that if it’s very close, we might not be sure until all the votes are counted, which could take more than just a single day) - just too much traffic on here and world to keep up.
If I were in their position (and an {even bigger} asshole but that’s implied), my plan would involve claiming partial credit for defeating [Losing_Candidate]. When the new POTUS does things I don’t like, I can also get all sanctimonious and preachy about not having voted for them so my hands are clean. Best of both worlds.
Only if the money from Russia and/or China and/or Iran dries up.
They usually disappear and come back to blend in by either taking credit for a good win, or a victim to a loss.
…yes, and then they will pay attention in another 3 1/2 years…
Yes, just like the few two times.
Bonus: they are all troll accounts
