Assuming there’s nothing stopping you from legally voting
Who are you supposed to vote for when you feel it doesn’t matter? Or when you feel that all candidates are insufficient?
Additionally, if we’re speaking of the US, the electoral college can and will supercede the popular vote. We literally put these people in power just to say we’re wrong and they will quickly say we’re wrong and work against the popular votes because we gave them the authority
Ah yes the classic, “i cant decide between voting for fascism or against it. Really tough choice”
OP wants to know why people don’t vote. If you believe in voting you’re probably not going to like any of the answers but they shouldn’t be downvoted for answering the question as asked.
I assume a good chunk of people who don’t vote live in non-contested counties/states and feel that it’s pointless to vote.
Which is weird, because in those cases you can vote for whatever 3rd party candidate is closest to what you want. In the distant past I voted Green for this reason, knowing it didn’t matter. (Since then the state swung left a bit and I vote Democrat. I even registered as Democrat to vote for Bernie in the primaries…)
I moved from the UK in my early 20s, prior to that I was young and stupid, so I neglected to vote there. Then I moved to America and started the green card process, and didn’t feel it was right to vote for things back in the UK as it wasn’t my home anymore and it wasn’t my place to say what should happen there. I finally naturalized around a decade after I moved here, and immediately signed up to vote. I actually cried at the polling station because I was so happy to vote for the first time ever!
Ok
My mom never registered to vote “because I don’t want to be picked for jury duty!” (stupid boomer face)
Wow so she was a bad citizen in two ways.
- Laziness / lack of any urgency that it will matter or make a difference to them personally
- They’re a disinformation campaign, and taking time telling you about refusing to vote is their attempt to influence the election
I suspect that almost everyone will fall into one of those two categories
I think there’s a third category, though may be a small offset of the first. Those who would like to, but don’t have the day off and can’t afford it.
They’re gonna have trouble affording smuggled oranges and tinned meat, too, when they’re in the camps with bread and water as the standard food.
I get what you’re saying and I’m not tryin to sit in judgement. But also, this one is fuckin important.
Well it may be be fuckin important but people have to fuckin eat and have a roof over their fuckin heads, too
1/3 of the possible voting populace doesn’t vote because they are told it won’t make a difference, when the last presidential election came down to a few thousand votes. Bugs the hell out of me.
Even if you’re in a non “swing” state, the totals shifting in some new direction will influence it becoming a non swing state over time. It still matters. Both ways.
This was the way the crazy people got abortion banned: They picked something that was crazy out of reach, and kept working for it until it was in reach. Instead of just saying “oh well who cares, it is difficult, I will wait until someone else makes it easy.”
Exactly, the reason it happened is because we became complacent to the point where the only way to win votes for them was to win the craziest sector, they knew everyone else would just keep voting (or not voting). They campaigned constantly because people would froth at the mouth over it and they knew they were single issue voters.
If the 1/3 of the people who don’t vote showed up in this election it could actually make a huge difference, hell it could show that the parties need to rethink their entire strategies. They still won’t though, but they should.
“Making a difference” and “electing one of two unpopular candidates” don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
If the two unpopular candidates were perfectly equal then your argument might have weight, but in my book there’s one that’s horrible, and one that’s not great, but also not horrible.
Politics never has a good candidate, it’s always between two bad choices. It’s just choosing the best of the two.
Politics never has a good candidate, it’s always between two bad choices.
Well now you’re catching on to why so many people don’t even bother. It’s almost as if these two parties want it that way so they can maintain their control. Why do you think the Democrats keep picking candidates that either lose or struggle to win against someone like Trump?
I guess in my thinking, if the act of not voting means you are okay with letting the worst candidate win, then by not voting it means I’m okay with a lot of innocent people being hurt by the horrid policies of the worse candidate. By voting for the lesser of two evils, I’m more saying “I don’t want that other candidate”.
You’re trying to say it’s their plot to give you two candidates. What if their plot is instead to convince you not to vote, so their bad candidate gets in easier because you could have helped stop it?
What are you helping to stop when both candidates are terrible? You’re helping in the same way that “thoughts and prayers” helps people. You’re simply participating in a rigged game and thinking that your participation is some sort of moral choice and “doing the right thing” when in reality that feeling is just self-gratification.
If you think you’re helping, why does the political landscape continue to devolve and slide further to the right regardless of who wins? Why are more and more people becoming poor and homeless while a handful of companies and individuals are reaping all the rewards? That’s the trajectory you’re arguing to help maintain here.
Personally the farther left we go, the louder the right gets. To me, I see a losing battle that they’re desperately trying to win. They may win temporarily now and again, but overwhelmingly the younger generations are more liberal. It’s why we see the desperate grab for power now, they know even with the tricks it’s just a matter of time.
And for your first, I stand by what I said. Your assumption is that both candidates are equal, so what’s the point. Except from my point of view, one is vastly better than the alternative, so there is a point.
“Unpopular” is a pretty carefully chosen criterion there
Damn straight which is why the Dems handed a win to Trump in 2016 and why polling shows that he’s likely to win again this year. It takes careful choosing to pick someone that people dislike so much that he can’t even win against a bloated orange fascist.
That’s like eating shit and lightning yourself on fire instead of just eating shit.
When you compare our choices to eating shit or eating shit and lighting yourself on fire, is it really much of a question why people aren’t volunteering to do either of those things?
One is going to be picked for you either way. Not voting doesn’t stop the shit eating from happening, just allows the lighting on fire to also happen.
By choosing the less shit option, politicians will see they need to be less shit to get elected, eventually to the point of maybe even having good candidates. Allowing the worst candidate to win tells the politicians they can get worse and still have their coveted power.
By choosing the less shit option, politicians will see they need to be less shit to get elected, eventually to the point of maybe even having good candidates.
This is demonstrably false. After Obama was elected twice we got Trump. Clinton was picked in 2016 and was so terrible that she couldn’t beat the orange turd. After her loss they gave us a “status quo” clone of her who barely managed to defeat the orange turd. Now we’re faced with the exact same choice and polling shows that it’s likely to end up like it did in 2016. Both parties continue to move further and further right regardless of who’s getting elected and we’re being forced to choose from the same tiny pool of candidates every election even though there are hundreds of millions of people in this country.
When those are the only two options, fuck yeah: Picking nothing is way worse than picking the least bad option. You’ll be either the metaphorical shit regardless, why risk worse?
Continuing to vote against the other candidate rather than voting for who you want allows them to keep doing worse and worse because that other party is always going to be there and always considered worse and supporters of that party will look at the other side and do the same. There is zero accountability for either side to the point where both candidates now openly support genocide and you have people arguing that “you’re a piece of shit for not supporting them.”
By continuing to vocally support eating shit, you’re ensuring that in a few elections we’ll be supporting eating shit and lighting ourselves on fire because the other side will be eating shit, lighting ourselves on fire, and giving a rim job to a horse. To support our current system is to support a race to the bottom.
People can and should criticize flaws, but to not vote because you don’t like either choice solves absolutely nothing, guaranteeing only that things will get worse. Your argument simply does not hold up and you’re arguing against something I never claimed.
We should continue to push for and work towards things like ranked choice voting, but letting the worst of the worst win is guaranteed to prevent progress.
If you’re not someone who doesn’t vote and you’re simply speculating, I would suggest you delete this comment.
I will give your suggestion 100% of the careful attention and obedience that it deserves.
OP deserves someone participating in the conversation who can honestly answer the question they’ve asked. Your speculation only adds to the ignorance others already have. You are enforcing an echo chamber and being disrespectful.
I mean your comment isn’t 100% off base. I was just being a little prickly about it for reasons that will become clear below – so the reason I chimed in is:
- Me saying my piece on it in no way makes it difficult for others who want to answer the question to give the answers OP deserves.
- Some of the people who are going to answer this question who fall into category #2 are going to lie, by definition, and I think it’s relevant to point that out and be able to talk about it (that that factor is relevant to the discussion). If everyone was coming into this discussion and telling the truth, then yes it would be inappropriate for someone else to come in and say what those other people’s answers were probably going to be.
A long debate about whether or not there are political astroturf accounts on Lemmy is probably off topic here, so I made a thread which might be a little more suited to it.
Voting is harder in the US. I can almost get that the one party has made it more difficult to vote because it benefits that party. I am ever in awe at the hardship americans can sometimes endure to vote, and then see it nullified.
Voting in Canada is quaint but effective: I go to a polling place, I - now, Americans, this is gonna offend you - bring my driver’s license to prove my ID, they write a line through my name on a piece of paper, I take the paper fn ballot behind the cardboard half-screen like it’s high-school, and mark a big X in a few boxes, fold it and drop it into another cardboard box carefully marked ‘ballots’. Then people count them by hand and by the end of the night we’re 100% done.
Not everyone has a system as simple and effective. It’s a massive effort to vote in America, and I’d love to see that fixed as well.
I don’t like either candidate. I don’t believe either one is better than the other so I have no stake either way.
Also the electoral college I don’t trust my representative will vote the way I want.
Also this country has been bought and paid for a long time ago. Most political affiliations are garnered by lobbyists employed by massive bureaucratic corporations.
Just look at the supreme Court.
You want change? Revolution is the only way. The tree of liberty should be fertilized by the blood of Patriots and tyrants from time to time.
I didn’t vote for years because I was busy trying to keep my head above water and I just couldn’t wrap my head around politics. I had my own shit to deal with during that time.
And here’s the long version - for those that are interested.
It’s one day, with most states allowing mail-in in advance. You have no excuse for not fulfilling your duty as a citizen to ensure least negative outcome of elections.
I had my own shit to deal with
So does every other fucking adult, and now we have even more shit to deal with, thanks for that
It takes one day to do the actual voting. It takes a lot more time to figure out who to vote for.
Don’t berate people like this man
He’s saying he didn’t even know what was happening. I bet trump won 2016 because in some peoples minds “it’s boll clintons wife vs the guy from the pizza hut ads…well I LIKE pizza!”
Before trump won, his “policies” weren’t well known. It’s hard to remember, but when he won, people were surprised that the joke candidate won. I’m sure some people clueless to politics did it for the lulz.
