cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/21429342
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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That's absolutely not the long term effect of voting for the lesser evil.
That's the effect of more people voting for the greater evil.
Yeah. This whole thing is a shell game to hide the fact that OP is gaming the candidate pool and ignoring the knock-on effects from the worst candidate being shut out every time.
Completely flawed.
Under first-past-the-post systems, as long as there are other people who support the greater evil, and evil's willing to use its power to increase its influence (whether that's removing anti-bias laws that restrict the press, raising limits on campaign donations, or more directly, things like gerrymandering), you'll get the shift towards evil from voting for the lesser evil, as the lesser evil will chase after the voters who vote for evil.
However, plenty of people notice that, and post memes like this one that encourage voting for a third party with no hope of winning or not voting at all, which only serves to accelerate the effect, as the lesser evil has to attract an even greater share of the evil demographic's vote to have any hope of winning. People say that voting third-party demonstrates to the lesser evil that it's worth courting non-evil voters, but that can't have any effect until the next election, and in the meantime, you're stuck with maximum evil for a whole term, and the hurdles to overcome grow larger.
The best hope is to start campaigning for a third party or non-evil candidate for the lesser evil party immediately after an election instead of leaving it until right before an election, as that hopefully gives enough time for support to grow enough that the lesser evil party will see non-evil as a meaningful demographic that's worth aligning with. It's not guaranteed to work, but if it doesn't, either evil is genuinely a majority and the democratic thing is to be evil, or the system isn't a democracy, and there's no way to remove evil by voting, so alternatives need to be considered.
So this image is positing that "left" is lesser evil and "right" is greater evil.
Just before line two, the greater evil has won. Because more people voted for the greater evil.
If more people had voted for the lesser evil, lines two through four would be reversed, and the result would be less evil.
Of course, the whole thing presumes that bOtH sIdEs are some unacceptable level of evil. Now, don't get me wrong, there are problems that need resolving, regardless of what kind of politics is involved. How and whether those problems get solved depends heavily on what kind of politics is involved.
That assumes they're adjusting based on votes, and I don't think they are. I think they chasing the window of public discourse on social issues (which is largely fabricated to start with) and moving as far right as they think they can get away with on governance
if the votes don't matter our society should just get more extreme in both directions and not one, unless the votes only matter for either the left or the right in which case voting would either benefit the left or weaken the right
It's the long term effect of voting for a lesser evil that knows it can get away with being shitty as long as it's better than the greater evil.