Assuming there’s nothing stopping you from legally voting
When all of the candidates on a ballot are going to actively work against my values, why would I vote for any of them? That said, I have written in choices before, but it’s a lot of work to do when literally no one will be taking notice of that vote.
Because one and only one of them might put you in a prison camp, and destroy the machinery by which you might ever hope to elect someone who would align with your values, without having to fight a war for it?
Or maybe, “only” deport 18 million people who didn’t do anything. But hey! If none of those 18 million is you or your family, that’d be okay. And you got to make your statement.
If I really cared about making a statement, I’d put more effort into regularly heading into polls to write-in my choice. I still would not be voting for either of the major parties.
I once couldn’t vote because I had to rush to my dying grandfather the day before the election. Apart from that I have voted in every single election.
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.
Apolitical spectator.
You’re part of the problem, removing a sane voice only allows the insane to be heard that much more.
Whose problem? I just said I operate as an apolitical spectator.
Unfettered capitalism has masterfully created a self-serve corporatocracy that filters money straight to the political parties who, in turn, pose puppet leaders in front of the masses to grant a semblance of choice. No good will come of this “Weekend at Bernie’s” farce of an election. Under current auspices, only more greed, lies, and violence are to follow.
Sorry, disenfranchisement and apoplexy are all that remain.
You’ve given into despair and have opted out entirely, which is exactly what the people you gripe about want you to do. Congratulations, you’ve surrendered.
You may well be correct on all counts.
A question was asked, and I answered honestly from my perspective.
I encourage you to reconsider and vote for whatever you perceive to be the least of all evils. Voting is relatively easy and doesn’t require much effort. It’s literally the least you can do. Yes, may not matter in the end, but it can still inform certain statistics that can be used to support various messages and arguments down the line. If you don’t vote at all, you guarantee you have no impact. Don’t throw away the little power you have.
Duly noted, and I appreciate your not relegating my opinion to snorting self-sourced methane expulsions.
The harder notion for me here is that I have been voting since Bush Sr. / Clinton. This toilet keeps spinning faster as we get closer to the drain.
Until recent years, I believed that voting was exercising my rights and fighting the good fight. Maybe I’m jaded, which I think is fair, but I do think, in light of the circus we’ve watched the the past 8 years, that we’ve entered a new arena where violence ultimately is where this is headed. Someone responded here that I have permission to be something other than sad. Unfortunately, I disagree. When the shots ring out in political rage, we’ve effectively lost our civility.
I will reconsider my decision to not vote, but the bitterness might win out.
Even if this does end in political violence or civil war, if you vote, at least you will have tried to avoid that fate by participating in our democracy as much as possible. Voting is just so easy to do, how can you justify not doing it as anything but laziness? It can’t hurt and takes almost no effort.
Voting is easy as hell, you have no excuse. Shame on you, quite literally part of the problem.
You’re permitted to do more than be sad
No good will come of this “Weekend at Bernie’s” farce of an election.
Hard disagree.
Anybody who has actually followed what Trump has done / is doing vs what Biden has done / is doing knows there’s a clear distinction between the two. One is clearly a worse choice. It reads like you’re just intoxicated by the smelling of your own farts.
How dare you accuse him of excessive fart-huffing. Jenkum plays a significant role in many cultures and economic systems. Educate yourself. Huff a splort.
Ok.
I used to vote. Then people told me I was doing it wrong. So I stopped.
Adult up. This falls into the life basket of “you shouldn’t care what other people think”.
Thanks for motivating me.
You don’t have to tell people how you voted. That’s why we have voting booths!
Because our system is so broken it’s like playing TF2 in 2020.
Probably more of a reason to vote.
Please consider voting. Don’t ignore your political voice.
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
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.
It takes one day to do the actual voting. It takes a lot more time to figure out who to vote for.
Everyone should invest that time.
- 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
“Doctors of Reddit…”
“I’m not a doctor, but…”
That’s your energy right there. Came in here hoping for actual answers and this trash comment is top. Pure speculation from someone on the opposite side.
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
If you’re not someone who doesn’t vote and you’re simply speculating, I would suggest you delete this comment.
Dude is just a douche who wants his soapbox.
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.
I will give your suggestion 100% of the careful attention and obedience that it deserves.
I’ll be appropriating this phrase. This requires no further action on your part. Thank your for your cooperation.
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.
“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 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.
I’m not allowed because I’m an immigrant, and I’ve only found out recently that I can vote while living abroad in national elections in the fatherland.
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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.
WTF?! In some states, your registered for jury duty when you get a driver’s license…
That’s what I told her!
don’t pick me for jury duty because always guilty 100% idgaf
I maliciously complied with Jury Duty. I went. I sat in the room 8 hours a day for a week reading a conspicuously large copy of “Atlas Shrugged”.
Weird, they didn’t pick me… :)
Jury duty wasn’t fun (child abuse case), but it was one hell of an education. I’m still greatful to have had such smart fellow jurors so we could really consider everything. You get to see how the world works.
I’m from the UK, I don’t vote simply because I don’t trust the shit politicians come out with during election periods and because of this I worry I will vote the wrong way. Time and time again promises are made and you never really seem to see the difference.
For example, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s been promised since Brexit more money will go into the NHS to release the pressure on the service. Yet the NHS seems to be in the worst condition currently it’s ever been in.
The NHS is bad by design. You can’t convert a great system to whatever the shit is in the US that makes. Avery select few people very rich. You first need to break it down by pulling money out of it, pull more money out of it, more still, then when it starts breaking down, complain about how badly it works and propose this wonderful new system that will fix all of that! Privatize everything and then move to whatever shit they have in the US and get rich
I mean, look at how great privatizing the rail system has worked out in the UK!
Or… anywhere else. Privatization of public transport or postal services is such a good idea.
Our railways are fucked, our healthcare system is hanging by a thread. I’m so grateful for NHS care and investigations in the last year - dread to think how much Americans would have to pay to find out they have a shitty disease, let alone treat it.
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
