this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I'm not gonna answer that question. I don't have the perfect answer ready for you.
Instead I will tell you what happens when you vote third party in FPTP. Okay, you have a .nl TLD so I guess ssyou're either in a much better electoral situation or just picked it because it's cool, but I will use the example of the upcoming US presidential election.
Now, let's say the race is really even and it's over. Flipping just one of several key battleground states would've placed Harris in the lead, but unfortunately, Trump won. You look at the votes in your state: Trump won by under 600 votes. Nearly 100,000 people voted for a third party candidate that's actually to the left of Harris. They would've preferred Harris, but because they voted third party, they elected Trump.
If this sounds familiar, that's what happened in 2000. Al Gore could've won. Should've won. But 3rd party candidate Ralph Nader was further left of him and received a bunch of votes that needed to go to Gore. In Florida, he had nearly 100k votes, and the difference between Bush and Gore was literally triple digits. And it wasn't even the only state where Gore lost because of the Spoiler Effect
It's an inherent flaw of the FPTP system and yes, it sucks. It means a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.
That's okay, I don't expect a "perfect" answer, but what you're revealing about yourself by not putting forward an answer is that you don't care about our wants, you're just mad that we're not doing what you want.
People tell me all the time voting is how to get what you want, so that's what I've done and what I'll continue to do.
Yes, I'm very familiar. Once again, I think this is just manipulating people into your desired outcome. I'm very happy to "spoil" my vote by advocating for someone I actually support, rather than throwing it away on someone I don't. The fault lies with the system, not with me.
The fuckery inherent in the current system being not your fault does not absolve you from voting responsibly in context of the current system. If you are going to throw in a protest vote you are asserting your portion of responsibility for the practical end result of that vote.
It's a good thing I vote responsibly then. An irresponsible vote would be one that perpetuates the current, broken system.
Because there are more effective forms of protest that don’t guarantee with 99.9% accuracy that a fascist is elected if people vote for an alternate party (literally the case this year with the margins, and “dictator day 1”).
Voting should be pragmatic. There are a million other ways to protest/lobby, but honestly the Democrats of today are far more progressive than 20 years ago, because of people who understand the system and change it from the inside, like AOC/Bernie.
Just straight up blatant lies here.
I can't think of a more powerful protest.
I would vote for either in a heartbeat but I can't because they won't be on the ballot. They will step down and insist you vote for Kamala instead. And even if they were you would insist that I not vote for them anyway because it's still "throwing away" my vote.
When either party puts forward a candidate without immediately-disqualifying horrendous traits, I will vote for them. But that absolutely never happens. It is almost always the worst-possible candidate, without even considering their political positions. They all accept massive donations from mega-PACs and a deplorable history of selfishness and lies.
How does a strategic practical vote within the current system perpetuate it any more or less than a throwaway protest vote?
Are you asking me how protests work? Is that really something that requires explanation?
I'm asking you how, specifically, a protest vote and a strategic vote are any different in terms of perpetuating the shitty system currently in place.
Holy shit, you are, okay. A protest vote, as the name suggests, protests the current system by showing that we would rather take time out of our day to show up to the polls and "throw away" our votes than to participate and be complicit in the current, forced 2-party system, where they both put forward absolute fucking rat-shit candidates, year after year after year.
Like, should I show my support for the fucking pathologically-lying felonious authoritarian sex abuser with the vocabulary of a 3rd-grader? Or the former DA who did what DAs do in the early '00s, and obscured exculpatory evidence so she could send people to live out the rest of their lives in a fucking prison in order to further her career (AKA a fucking psychopath), and whose main qualification is being a half-black female?
Now you may not like that, especially if you oppose voter reform, but don't be disingenuous by pretending to not understand how it works.
Who do you feel you're "showing" anything with a protest vote?
Protesting in the street works by showing the people in view that you're there in protest of a thing. However the viewer feels about you, the issue, or the concept of protesting, the fact that you're there doing it in that moment is public and undeniable. Protest votes, on the other hand, are a blip of mostly-invisible data that just get silently decoupled from the process and filed away once their irrelevance to the result is established. The election system, fucked and in need of reform as it is, has that built-in mechanism for quietly doing nothing in real life with your protest vote, and the system is certainly not going to be subverted or reformed at all by your having done it.
If that protest vote is the only means by which you're hoping to accomplish anything on Election Day, I'm still not sure I understand why one would bother.
I really don't know how to explain this further and at this point your questions feel very disingenuous.
It's not invisible to the people who need to see it.
Why would you assume that, other than that it's just what you want to believe? Do you also assume this about people who vote for Kamala and Trump?