this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts
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LOL and how do you suppose we make third parties viable? Thoughts and prayers?
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?
Not by voting for people in elections they can’t win. Vote at the local and state level or in primaries for people who will enact voting reform.
Like who?
I don't know where you live so I don't have any relevant suggestions, sorry.
Name anyone anywhere
You know that's not how elections work, but if you're genuinely interested here are some lists of third-party candidates in the US:
You can find comparable lists on the sites of many more non-frivolous political third parties in which you may be interested, which can probably be found from their Wikipedia entries.
WTF are you talking about? That's exactly how they work, and its what the person I replied to suggested I do about it.
This is just a list of people I've been repeatedly told in this thread that I should not vote for...?
This thread, specifically this comment, is telling you you should vote for alternative parties at state and local levels. The idea is to build up that third party's actual presence in government from the ground up, which is a far superior strategy to splitting a critical presidential race and feeling like you've accomplished anything good.
Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.
You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you'll fall prey to Durverger's Law and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
I favor STAR, it's the best system designed to date.
The problem is that these systems are way more complex and have edge cases where someone unpopular gets elected. Making major changes to a system that has worked for 248 years seems like a recipe for disaster.
Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.
Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.
Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.
After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.
It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.
STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.
Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.
As opposed to the current system, where someone unpopular always gets elected?
It hasn't worked. It's deeply flawed and we currently use the worst-possible process, rooted in ancient history.
And why would anyone do that when everyone takes time out of their day to express their approval for the existing 2 parties?
Smaller elections. Get state representatives, win a few seats in the house, a few senators… When your party actually contributes to governing then you can discuss running for president. Until then you won’t beat Nader or Perot
And I will repeat the same thing I told the other person who said this. Who should I vote for? What politicians are supporting and advocating for reforming US elections? The answer is none of them, because they'd be lambasted and shunned for trying to upend the status quo.