this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Even if the choices were Literally Hitler and Double Hitler - choose single Hitler. Less Hitler is better, actually! I don't fucking care how you feel about casting that ballot. It's not a love letter. Opting out won't magically mean nobody takes office.
Dilemmas don't go away if you say "I don't wanna."
I wonder sometimes if elections were specifically turned around if it would improve things. That is, you don't vote FOR someone, you just cast a vote saying 'not that guy, anyone else is better' and whoever has the least votes against them wins.
I'm not sure what the downsides would be, but I think people would better understand it if it was framed that way.
I mean, it's sort of what we have now: you can vote against one of the two possible candidates by voting for the other one, or you can refuse to participate by voting for anyone else. But reframing it to explicitly be voting against the person you don't like might result in better participation.
If we're gonna fuck with it - either go ranked (and use a sensible selection method), or else let people check all the names they like. Most votes wins. That's called Approval Voting, it gets near-ideal results, and it is genuinely that simple.
This pick-one-guy approach just plain sucks. There's no reason for it. It's not even how we did things to begin with! Voters in the 18th century wrote two names for president. Runner-up was vice-president. That changed after congress took thirty-five failed attempts to make the electoral college work. The twelfth amendment, instead of getting rid of that stupid fucking system, just streamlined the presidency and vice-presidency into separate single-winner seats.