I can imagine that there would be less reason for many to vote when there are only two options to vote for. What would it take for USA to implement a multi party system like many of the other democraties in the world?
Basically a complete teardown and overhaul of the system. The biggest problem is that seats in congress are not proportioned representationally. For example, in the UK, if a particular party receives 5% of the vote, then roughly 5% of the seats in the House of Commons are assigned to members appointed by that party. In the US, if a party receives 5% of the vote, they get nothing. Additionally, the US is further hampered by the fact that we elect our president directly instead of going with a prime minister approach, where the minister is appointed by the party or party coalition that won the election. Because of this, there is a lot of pressure placed on voters in every election to vote for the candidate they hate the least, since if they don't, there's a good chance that the candidate they hate the most will become president.
If we had a representational vote, on the other hand, people could feel free to vote for whichever party most suited their political tastes, knowing that they will have a chance at being represented in the government that follows the election. Often times, a single party doesn't win enough votes to have a majority in governments like this, so they have to cooperate with other parties to form a coalition government. In situations such as these, sometimes small parties can play a pivotal role. For example, in the 2017 UK general election, the number of seats needed to secure a majority was 326 (650 seats total, need more than 50%), but the Conservatives only managed to get 318 seats. They were able to team up with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), however, who had gotten 10 seats in the election to form a Conservative-DUP coalition government. So the people who voted for DUP in that election got some extra concessions from the new government because the Conservatives needed them.
Because the US system is an all-or-nothing affair, where we are concerned only with someone winning a plurality rather than a majority of the votes, it necessarily will degrade into a 2-party system over time no matter how many parties you start with. It's just a mathematical reality. For example, imagine you have 6 parties, and the vote breakdown is as follows:
Party A: 38% of the vote
Party B: 32% of the vote
Party C: 12% of the vote
Party D: 11% of the vote
Party E: 5% of the vote
Party F: 2% of the vote
In this situation, voters would quickly realize that party F doesn't have a chance to win going forward. So they're more likely to vote for a party that doesn't align as well with their politics, but that actually has a chance of winning in future elections. Maybe they give their votes to Party C, for example. Over time, this effect is carried out again and again, and the numbers of people who vote for the two biggest parties reach a sort of equilibrium, with all of the other parties dying out or having next to no votes. Because the people voting for Party F get nothing if their candidate loses, they are heavily incentivized to settle. So, in effect, our current political situation is a result of the systems we chose, and their effect on game theory.
I feel like some ad by her with surrounded by 280 people saying this is all that stands protecting you from these draconian laws (better worded) could be a good type of ad.
the “Voting is Not Harm Reduction” article is possibly the most covert insidious thing that’s happened to online political discourse since 2019.
somehow, it’s managed to SEO weasel its way on top of every other article since the dawn of the internet for the search terms “voting harm reduction” and similar. and not just once, but reposted to every corner of the internet imaginable. literally try it now, if you set your google search to find articles before February 5, 2020, you will see inumerable articles with diversity of positions on the topic. after that? literally just the same article reposted and crosslisted, with the occasional reddit/twitter/tumblr comment thread.
it’s not even a bad article per se, it’s just indecently self-contradictory as OOP says, admitting at the beginning that small rights can be preserved by engaging in voting, and then pulling a 180 and accusing those who vote of perpetuating white supremacy.
like i get it, harm reduction has a specific meaning originating in addiction treatment. but for heavens sake, this flub of language doesn’t mean you should throw away one of the only miniscule rights the oppressor class has granted you to help your neighbors.
obviously i have no proof, but if presented with further evidence of conspiracy i wouldn’t doubt it. probably not even the author’s fault, but more of an “unwitting pawn” situation.
end point, the material consequences of this article being pervasive is an advantage to conservative power, moreso than it is to indigenous people.
Honestly, this kinda shit probably wouldn't be that difficult to pull on the other side.
Spin up some bigoted rightwing shithead as a persona to get a conservative audience, then manipulate them to undermine the right's goals. They're already so primed to fall for bullshit conspiracy theories and magical thinking they'd probably be pretty easy to manipulate.
I thought about it. Like create a Truth Social account as be all vocal about “Yay Trump” and “The election is rigged fuck voting I don’t care” and talking up RFK and Qanon and accusing different people of crimes against conservatism if they don’t agree with me.
I decided (1) I’m not quite sure how to go about it or even good strategies, it seems like you need an army of people making 8 rubles an hour or whatever to really make an impact (2) I’m not a whore; just doing destructive lying all day doesn’t seem honorable or fun.
Or (3) it simply would still be facilitating the goal of right wing discourse.
Which is usually the issue at hand. Most right wing discourse is just monkeywrenching progress be it civil, social, scientific, etc. It isn't something you can invert.
Speaking personally as a brit i'm not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election but in the case of britain at least im absolutely not going to be voting for Keir Starmer since most of the left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for the most right wing and second worst (to his "credit", unlike Tony Blair, he doesnt have the blood of a million iraqis on his hands, only 30,000 palestinians) party leader labour's had in recent memory were the exact same people 5 years ago saying they couldnt in good faith vote for the most far left, trans positive labour leader in decades because he criticised Israel which led to the largest conservative majority in years.
Lots of the content posted by the user is just generically-relatable memes: Check
Account was recently created: Check
Emotional framing ("left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for"): Check
I actually guessed that most of those would be true, and the point of view that the message would express, the instant I read "Speaking personally as a brit" and before I expanded the message.
I'm saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
Okay though, sure. My response to the content is contained in the OP meme: Even if we posit that Gaza is 100% Biden's doing and he's a lesser evil, which I don't agree with, but even positing that, this "oh boo hoo I have to swallow my pride and vote for the person who doesn't want to impose 30% inflation on Iran for no fucking reason and 'finish the job' in Gaza and separate Hispanic kids from their families and do mass deportations, I don't want to, that would mean swallowing my pride, so I won't and you shouldn't either" viewpoint is childish, incredibly destructive, and probably not a sincere point of view, but instead a deliberate deception to produce an incredibly destructive result in US politics that may do quite a lot of harm to quite a lot of people.
It's born -- if it is sincere -- out of an incredibly selfish and entitled mindset. There are people in the world who don't have the luxury of deciding to do things they do or don't want to; there are hungry families in Iran, dead Kurds, dead Ukrainians, Honduran kids who will never see their families again, who absolutely don't give the slightest shit what you do or don't feel like voting for, or whether you're emotionally motivated to take a single trivial action that you can do that might help keep their families alive. They don't have the luxury of looking at things that way.
That's as it's applied to the US. I'm not really familiar enough with UK politics to say the details of how it applies in the UK -- but the logic is universally bad. For example if someone was saying not to vote against Boris Johnson for the same absolutely bad-faith and horrifyingly wrong reasons, I would feel free to disagree with them firmly in exactly the same way.
I’m saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
one of our accounts is 8 months old and talks about a variety of other general interests and things that arent just to do with politics as well as modding several of the queer comms in lemmy.blahaj.zone; the other is a three month old account that exclusively posts about politics and martialling people to vote for the democrats and stuff, there's far more grounds to call you a "shill" for the democrats than to call me a "shill" for the british Green Party or Jeremy Corbyn or whatever.
and one of the points i made was literally that the people now who are saying to vote for Keir Starmer against Rishi Sunak now are literally the same people who voted for Boris Johnson to stop Jeremy Corbyn coming into power because he was "too left wing" just five years ago but now i have to fall in line behind them when they utterly tanked the labour party and refused to fall in line just a few years ago unless we let them be in charge and push their transphobic neoliberal zionist ideology instead, one of the old mainstays of this group, David Mencer, the former director of Labour Friends of Israel, is now literally working for the Israeli government as an official spokesperson
At no point was in weighing on talking about the US, I was talking about the UK. I even said "as a brit i’m not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election"
I'm not "claiming" my queerness or some shit, i live it and i face the consequences of living it
yes, most of my posts are in the garfieldist subreddit which i made because i like garfield and the femcel_posting sub for transfems because I'm a transfem and i find the memes funny, sorry that i have a personality and other interests that arent just politics
my account is literally almost three times older than yours
the thing you posted was far more emotive than mine and literally accuses anyone who doesnt want to vote for an accomplice to genocide of saying "vulnerable people should die for my ideology" (frankly i dont care which people vote for but to say anyone protesting bidens complicity in the bombing of gaza just want to kill gay people or whatever while the democratic party tells them they just have to accept that "palestinians should die for our ideology" so that biden can win the election is disgusting), but because i very briefly expressed in just one sentence a fraction of the anger i feel at the (entirely cis) starmerite talking head harpies in this country who supported the tory majority into power so that we've had five years of uncontested rule by them and who arent affected in the slightest by the institutionialised transphobia of the conservative and labour parties yet expect me to come happily to vote for the man who entirely bulldosed the most progressive party britain has ever had and is directly calling for me and people like me to be segregated out of our crumbling healthcare service suddenly im the one being emotional or whatever?
im not even refusing to vote, im just voting for a different party which isnt actively trying to screw me over, why would i ever vote for Sir Keir "trans rights can’t override women’s rights" Starmer?
Makes some amount of sense. And sure, I have no idea if you're telling the God's honest truth about all this stuff or if you're exactly what I'm accusing you of being. (My server for some reason showed the wrong age for your account, so strike that one.)
But, the fact remains -- I am not lying when I tell you I predicted exactly a bunch of the features of your account, and more or less what you were going to say in the post (the talking point that people are trying to pressure you into voting for the less-harmful candidate when you emotionally don't want to, and that you're taking a principled stand against it by refusing and voting for a third party instead, which is an incredibly common shill talking point) just from reading the few words. If it's pure coincidence and you just happen to hit all those shill boxes by accident then I apologize, but honestly, I doubt it.
my vote for the Green party isn't an emotional "I cant bring myself to vote for this piece of shit" thing, its entirely a strategic vote - it signals to the Labour party that there are people willing to vote for them if they were to move back to the left rather than constantly chasing the votes of the mytholigised moderate conservatives who are finally too disgusted with the rampant corruption and infighting of the current conservative to keep voting for them, it helps the green party gain more ground that labour wont get a >51% majority in the houses of parliament so they'll have to coalition build with the green party and listen to some of their demands if they want to get stuff done (after all, they're not going to be coalition building with the Workers Party of Britain since its basically just one guy who hates the modern labour party with a burning passion and gives a speech at the house of commons every now and again about how the county of Rochdale needs more NHS funding and also how Starmer and Sunak will be seeing the fires of hell for their crimes), and there's not much risk of the conservative party winning now after the last decade of corruption stories and infighting (the funniest of which was the exposé of david cameron's pig fucking ritual about a decade ago imo), the splintering of the far right of the party to join with the remnants of the Brexit Party (which was formed of the remnants of UKIP and the overtly fascist British National Party) and form into the Reform Party and the split off of some of the left of the party into the Liberal Democrats Party and, in a few cases, into the starmerite Labour Party.
Before the genocide in gaza i was still considering holding my nose and falling in line just in case, but seeing the rabid zionism of the Labour Party in action as loads of MPs have either been forced out for alleged antisemitism for criticising Israel or left in protest over the culture that Starmer's forced onto the party from the top down gave me a realisation that it was necessary to actually vote for people who will oppose them in parliament rather than just hope that someday they'll change and get better
This person has an older account than you and seems less like a shill from their post history than you. Calling someone’s identity into question because they oppose your political views is also a trash move.
Don't you have proportional representation over there and then the House decides the PM? Voting for a third party has a non-zero chance of being useful. Go for it, why not?
Americans voting for a third party under FPTP may as well just throw their ballot in the trash. Same difference.
As far as I know (and I could be wrong), they use an electoral-college type deal -- you don't vote directly for the leader, but instead for your district's MP in a FPTP vote, and then as you said the majority in parliament decides on the prime minister. They were trying recently to switch to proportional representation because it's clearly better, but as far as I could tell it didn't work.
So yes, just like in the US, her voting Green Party won't change anything aside from strengthening the conservative party, unless she happens to be one of a couple of districts where the Greens have a competitive race. I actually voted third party in many elections in the US (in elections where Hitler wasn't on the ballot), so I won't say I think it's throwing the vote away... I also however traded votes with family members a few times when one of us was in a competitive state and the other wasn't, and I wanted them to vote third party while I was doing an establishment-party vote in a race where the outcome was more uncertain.
no evidence that any of these people are white? advocates a position that protects the interests of POC?
why is this posted here? this is such a useful and well formed post but i have this community blocked and only found this thru some modlog drama. whatever lol. saving this for later reposting somewhere more relavant. thanks for sharing OP. :)
I ran into someone like this on Lemmy just yesterday. They said that "we" deserve to suffer if Trump gets elected. I said that I was guessing they weren't queer or a person of color. They were not. Therefore they were not part of "we." 'Innocent people that are definitely not me deserve to suffer so that America gets what it deserves' is a really fucking galling attitude.
Your voting system is so fucked. Like voting should be something that people like to do. I want to vote for people that align with my values the most. But no, you have to be strategic and choose the lesser evil to not accidentally end up with fucking fsscists like Trump again. It's fucked. Still tho, please prevent Trump.
This is like a teenager getting all upset that the family can't go on a trip because money is tight and saying it's not faaaaaaaaaiiir.
Yes, powerful people are trying to do evil with the levers of government. There are people who wake up all day every day and try to prevent them, or to make good things happen anyway, with varying levels of success. Just getting all whiny about it because everything's not automatic or already fixed for you, and you have to either do what you can within the system or work for change outside the system or else get used to things being shitty (and with Trump maybe get exponentially worse), shows a lack of understanding of how the world works.
Both users show a degree of logic in their arguments: User A’s concern about the need for a fairer voting system and User B’s point about the necessity of working within or outside the system to enact change. However, the conversation seems to falter in terms of constructive engagement and empathy towards each other’s views. Each response escalates the emotional charge and distance between their positions, reducing the potential for a reasoned, good-faith discussion. The mutual misunderstanding—highlighted by User A questioning if an LLM (language model) wrote User B's response—suggests a breakdown in communication where the logic and intentions of the arguments might be overshadowed by their emotional expressions and rhetorical tactics.
We already know that the problem is First Past The Post (FPTP) voting. Literally everyone qualified to hold office in the USA knows it. But would you vote for someone who's incompetent at best, making things only slightly worse for 4 years?
Every election, the answer is a resounding yes. Vote for the lesser evil, and then we'll rely entirely on direct action between elections, like strikes.
Then the lesser evils shut down a badly needed rail strike, at a time when that could have been the start of something big.
So you tell me what you'd do, I'm genuinely curious.
Look at the number of people who want human rights and fair living conditions. If we had a voting system that would allow us to score or rank multiple candidates we'd have a functioning country even despite the gerrymandering and Electoral College bullshit.
Even in countries where it's undoubtedly a LOT better like Germany, I vote purely strategically. No super small parties that won't make it into parliament cause that vote would be wasted. Stuff like that.
And I would absolutely vote for the conservatives to prevent the fascists. Basically, don't take it for granted and try to get the most out of it every time.
Just remember there are people Mango who respond to every single post on the entire thread but can't handle reacting to a single counter argument to their ideas. That's why you need to vote, and if you are Mango and you try to over analyze this post and can't even see something hitting you in the face your vote wouldn't help me achieve my interests anyway. If you vote, keep doing what you are doing.
Explain why taking the principled stance is worth risking Trump enacting Project 2025.
I would agree with you if the Republican candidate was more moderate, but we're talking about someone who wants to make the shitty two party system a hellish one party system
I can never understand that argument (not even going into the fact that it is the IDF that is committing genocide in Gaza, not Biden or any other western leader). Do these people believe Trump would stop supporting Israel? Stop sending weapons and funding that genocidal war? That's laughable and I can only assume it is a bad faith argument employed to convince potential democratic voters to abstain, thus strengthening Trump. Because nobody can be that aggressively naïve, right?
Bunch of you clowns on lemmy these days. Anti-vote, anti-Biden, anti-democrat. A concerted effort slinging made up crap like “genocide Joe” and other extreme hyperobole equating voting dem, or voting at all, as some sort of support for Israel’s actions.
None of you ever mention trump basically stating he’s going to give Israel free rein to wipe out hamas/palestine, hand Ukraine to the Russians, undermine NATO and fellate dictators everywhere, much less spare no effort to make himself a permanent dictator here in the US.
I believe that the effective growth of this kind of stuff, coupled with the decay of "objective" journalism whatever its significant faults might have been, is behind the surge in authoritarianism worldwide in places that used to be democracies. Reduced to the core, the price of a machine that turns money into public opinion has been going down, down, down, to the point where all you need is like 30-40 people working 40 hours a week at it, in order to create a significant change in electoral results anywhere in the world you'd like to create one.
TIL I'm a Russian bot. I see this stupid assumption being made all over Lemmy anytime someone advocates for not voting for Biden. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian bot or a shill. Some of us have different opinions and you look like an idiot when you make this accusation.
All I’m hearing is a Russian bot doesn’t like that we are catching onto this bullshit and calling them out. A lot evidently. Good to know I’m not alone. Fuck off russian bot.
The only tangible difference between a Biden presidency and a trump presidency is that LGBT folks and minorities will have a much, much worse time under Trump, but fuck them gays, right? Better to let them die in jail than vote for the guy that won't throw them in jail
Oh look. It's time for another round of "the ethically bankrupt decisions of the powerful people in the world are your fault because voting is real."
It must be all the lead poisoning making people so shallow minded as to believe the toys they're sold and occupied with are anything but a means to keep them in line and shift blame. Your cheap TV tells you what they want you to think and exists for that. Voting is a black box that exists to convince you that there's a chance you can improve outcomes rather than just serve the rich. Political faces are literally only faces.
Change my mind. Prove to me that voting is actually implemented and a functional interaction with the world. Hint: Some words on my screen will be about as meaningful as a Harry Potter book at best. I see voting to be about as real of an attempt at achieving something as praying. It's a way to convince yourself your supposedly good intentions will have any sway over reality.
Who do you imagine is showing me presentations, that make me think these things? I'm just curious.
Family separations at the border; for anyone in one of those families, the result of Trump being in office during that time versus Clinton or Biden is pretty fuckin significant
How do you know that Trump or Biden even exist? You doing any first hand investigations? Do you even have the kind of time and resources to investigate literally anything?
As do yours, dipshit. I'm sorry that you saw a bunch of depressing news and it turned you into a nihilistic edgelord, but you need to stop trying to drag other people down with you by trying to convince us that since we can't conclusively 100% definitively prove that voting makes a difference, we shouldn't bother getting off our couches on election day.
There is zero proof of the existence of God, yet people still pray. Even if they aren't sure they really believe, hey, they might as well. There is a mountain of evidence that voting works and it costs $0 to do it.
$15/hr minimum wage. People living in a studio apartment can now ring up people's hamburgers without choosing between food and rent as a direct result of a ballot measure in several states across America. But who's counting?
With a population of people like you, just a few different time wasting distractions will give me complete control over you. Waste your time all you like. I don't have a horse in the race anymore.
With a population of people like you, just a few different time wasting distractions will give me complete control over you.
Very interesting choice of words.
I had my suspicions you had an ulterior motive to convince leftists not to vote when you didn't even try to defend your position, instead responding with the standard troll evasions and goalpost moving. It's nice having it confirmed, though.
Oh, and just in case anyone at home is keeping score: the SAG-AFTRA strike directly prevented Hollywood from replacing all of their existing actors with AI recreations and subsequently firing them.
I'm gonna get a little self congratulatory about it. During Covid, I was watching the news coming out of China, and somewhat ahead of the curve on explaining to people that it was going to be a huge deal, even down to the specifics of we're going to need to stay home for a while but it won't be an apocalypse, we want to stock up on masks, things like that. One of my friends actually told me I seemed like I had the inside track on it. If I was just watching CNN for what was going to happen I would have been absolutely an idiot about it... I actually remember when the news and CDC was telling people masks didn't work, and me telling someone "This might sound a little weird, but I actually don't think that's true." And then explaining why.
I've known people who've worked for presidential candidates and spent some amount of time with them. The world is not as isolated and theoretical as you're making it sound. I get what you're saying, but there's a whole world of experience beyond just what happens on the screen. If you're purely in the consumer mode then yes. If you're active in the actual events then you start to learn what is worth listening to and see what seems well-founded in terms of how things actually play out.
That's why abortion is a good touchstone. It's a lot of Republicans' first harsh wake up call to the idea that the news and how things are packaged has been lying to them all this time. I've been wrong about things plenty of time, but IDK why you would assume my only experience with the world is just what I'm observing on the screen.
40% reduction in emissions predicted by 2030 (not that that's enough, but it's definitely a difference from what Trump would have done)
(If you can tell me Trump maybe isn't real, I can tell you, yes it's definitely going to happen exactly that way because the New York Times told me so. The truth probably lies between those two extremes.)
You're an odd one. Twice now you've said that words on a screen are pointless, yet you're trying to convince others with words on their screens, thus showing that you believe words on a screen can be used to sway others, otherwise why would you bother debating at all if you believed words useless. But bad arguments seems to be all you have, so I guess that's just another example of it.
That's entirely true, but the difference between my words and their words are that I want people to turn their attention to the people actually doing the bad things instead of the distraction they're giving everyone as a pacifier. At the very least I want people to stop blaming themselves for not doing enough with things that are far outside their control. I can't fix the world's problems and don't think any of you can either. I'd rather you all be at peace with that than flail around under the water.
At the very least, I'm just a dude with a phone and not one of those bots going around trying to sway the population into wasting their time.
At most, maybe someone can come along and actually prove that voting isn't a black box. I don't have a lot of hope for that one. They'd have to practically take me on a physical tour of the political system, show me the source code of voting systems and prove to me that particular source code is what's actually being used.
It's way more complex than a tour -- it's a whole process; among other things, they have average Joe Schmoes from both major parties overseeing everything (i.e. not like the DNC's agents, more like Betty who's been doing it since the 1970s), and they do things like hand recounts of randomly selected portions of the ballots that got fed into the machines, to give warning signs if someone has tried to rig the machines. It's definitely not perfect; in the early 2000s there were very, very strong indications that the Republicans were rigging election machines on a pretty big scale. But I think asserting that just because you personally don't understand how it works it means it must be untrustworthy is also not really airtight either.
My strongest argument for saying that it's not rigged is that, if it was rigged, I think it's highly unlikely that the establishment powers would have picked Trump. But yes, by signing up as an election worker, you can literally see for yourself a lot of the safeguards that are in place (at least in your area) and decide for yourself whether you think they're overall trustworthy.
apparently, he doesn't believe that Trump actually exists, so it's more than a little likely he's either completely insane and detached from reality, or, more likely, is just acting in bad faith / is disingenuous / an intelligent troll.
Most of the time I try to respond to people as if they were real and sincere unless they give me a specific reason to think they're not, even if internally I have some doubts.
I'm way easier to be around than people screeching about stuff entirely out of their control who are trying to get others to screech just the same. They do say misery likes company though, and I prefer to be alone.
It's almost as if they have a little script of a handful of arguments that they like to switch among, and aren't actually organically reading the content and having organic thoughts that they feel like sharing in response, so it sometimes doesn't register with them if one of the things on their list has some specific connection with the meme they're responding to. Result, they don't react differently or even acknowledge the connection, they just say the thing on their list.
Oh you mean the thing that's completely made up by rich people to make me think I could have changed something so I'm less inclined to hunt down the people actually responsible? Yeah I'm convinced. /s
I voted 3rd party as a Green voter last presidential election, and when I looked at the actual numbers I saw that lately we have been outnumbered by the Libertarian voters as well... so, if someone is advocating arguing* that 3rd party voters take away votes from the two major parties then I think it seems important that that ideology would also be applied to Libertarians. I wonder if Democrat voters really think that the most hardcore small-government, pro-gun voters are also going to cast a vote for them if they were compelled to cast a vote of one of the two major parties instead of their 3rd party?
You seem to be confusing a social responsibility to vote for a viable candidate (which this thread is referring to) with advocating for a compulsory two party system (which is a terrible idea)
