Gonna rig the election by not voting for Trump 10.000.000 times, thus, somehow, giving Biden 10.000.000 votes. Any advice on which states would be best not to vote for a candidate?
Gonna rig the election by not voting for Trump 10.000.000 times, thus, somehow, giving Biden 10.000.000 votes. Any advice on which states would be best not to vote for a candidate?
It’s First Past The Post, which means the candidate with the most votes wins, no matter if they have majority approval. The actual way individual votes affect the outcome depends on state, voting district and a bunch of other factors that aren’t relevant for this explanation.
Not voting mathematically ends up supporting the candidate with the most votes. Suppose ten people have the right to vote, there’s three candidates A/B/C, the vote is split 4/3/1, one person abstained. Candidate A wins. The person abstaining could have voted for B to change that outcome, but didn’t, so their abstinence supported A.
Now, who exactly you vote for matters as well. Suppose candidates B and C have similar ideas that very much oppose those of A, but one voter ended up going with C over some issue particularly significant to them. It stands to assume that the C-voter would have been happier with B than A.
By not voting for B, they have inadvertently weakened B’s position, which is called a Spoiler Effect: Because they ony have a single vote, any votes not put toward the two most popular candidates end up wasted, as the actually significant race happens between those two.
For those reasons, any vote not spent on Biden risks supporting Trump in the event that he turns out the winner. Thus, if you oppose Trump’s politics, it’s vital to support Biden (unless you oppose his even more, in which case you’re kinda fucked).
First Past The Post with a single, non-transferable vote is an awful system that always leads to binary politics where typically both parties will want to appeal to as many people as possible, sacrificing ideological integrity and eventually leading to a stagnation, unless one side’s propaganda happens to shift the overton window in their favour and the whole system begins to gradually shift into their direction as well.
I’m not pretending to have a solution. Voting systems is one hell of a complex topic. All I am certain of is that any system that ends up silencing actual progressive leftist voices is shit and should be abolished.
I’m being facetious mocking the notion that by not voting for Biden one is voting for Trump. I understand the intricacies and failures of the US electoral system, and I understand that in a two-party race, by not voting for the one person, you’re making it harder for them to win. However the mistake in the logic is pretending as if this is some extravagant circumstance.
It is correct that by not voting for Biden he will get less votes, and thus have a harder time winning. The same goes for Trump, by not voting for him he gets less votes and will thus have a harder time winning. The same goes for a third candidate. That’s the way elections work: You need votes to win.
If Biden wants to win, he should do something to get votes.
In other words: It is correct that by not voting for A, B will be more likely to win, since A will have less votes. A should probably do something to get more votes then.
Edit: Thank you for your well-thought out input and answer to my question however. I do very much appreciate your sincere response <3
Man, I suck at recognising humour. I thought the OP was a joke, but the comment might be serious. Ah well, F for eFfort I guess :D
That’s not how math works.
If you don’t vote, here is how you mathematically affect each candidate:
A: +0
B: +0
C: +0
The difference in percentage points between splits of 5/4 and 5/5 is 5.555…
In absolute terms, yes, not doing anything doesn’t support anyone, but in a context where the comparison between candidates is determinant and actual political consequences are on the table, the potential of your vote matters. Choosing not to vote means choosing not to oppose whatever candidate ends up winning.
Choosing to let them win is no different in effect to supporting them, with the exception that it doesn’t support a specific candidate up front, but rather lets the rest of the voters decide which candidate profits from your inaction.
Not voting benefits the candidate whose victory was not challenged by your vote. Thus, you’re effectively donating your vote to the collective.
No, it means choosing not to support any candidate. You don’t vote against a candidate, you vote for one. If there was a vote that just said “Do you want Trump to be president, yes or no?” I’d vote no because that’s all my vote is doing, it’s voting against someone I don’t like.
But voting for Biden isn’t just a vote against Trump. Voting for Biden means supporting genocide of Palestinians.
So if I want to oppose Biden - which I do because genocide is bad - how should I vote to properly oppose him? Obviously I’m not going to vote Trump. The only options left are third party or not voting. But I imagine you think voting third party would help Trump too.
If you want to effectively oppose Biden, vote for the candidate most likely to beat him. If you want to effectively oppose Trump, vote for the candidate most likely to beat him. If you want to oppose both, throw yourself on the floor and have a tantrum because it’s about as useful as voting third party or abstaining.
That’s the issue with FPTP and Spoiler Effect. You can vote for the lesser evil, to buy time for efforts to actually install some form of democracy. Not voting doesn’t oppose Biden nor Trump. It just passes the decision on to the rest. If you didn’t try to change the outcome, you’re tacitly agreeing with it.
The US “democracy” is fucked up. There’s no winning. The best you can do is try to keep the political course from steering into Nazi waters, because that’s sure to fuck up any chance of change, peaceful or otherwise.
On the contrary; participation in the electoral system is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy of the system.
This is recognized by the US government whenever it questions the legitimacy of elections in other countries based on voter participation and in it’s support of voting boycotts such as occurred in Venezuela.
The fact that the very opposite rhetoric is used when convenient for domestic purposes is simply just another example of American hypocrisy, "one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else’.
Unfortunately you cannot prevent fascism by voting for the lesser fascist. The direction of your energy into doing so is an explicit part of the strategy for maintaining the slide into fascism. The rigged game can only be beaten by rejecting it’s rules.
So your suggestion is to boycott the vote, in the anticipation that this will somehow change the electoral system? That suddenly, the people in charge will go “Oh wow, we’ve got such low voter turnout, I guess we’ll need to abolish the system that keeps us in power”? They won’t apply those same rules anyway. Hence my suggestion would be to use the system to slow the descent while mobilising people outside of it to affect change.
But you got me curious. What strategy to you suggest to fix that system? My personal hope so far lies with educating people, having discussions like this one, in the distant optimism that it will erode support in the system and the backlash when inevitably, this conflict of ideologies escalates to violence or at least massed protests. But I’m an idealist, and tend to be naive, so I’d love to know your take.
I’m not the person you were talking to but I’ll make a few points
You act like these are things that do not have an effect on one another.
If you legitimise the system by telling people to vote in it, you impact the ability you have to mobilise people to revolt against that system.
How much total organising energy do you suppose is spent on electoralism? You vote every 2 years, and organisers spend many months of those 2 years entirely dedicated to their electoralism. Voters too spend those months dedicated to following the electoralism. This is a VAST quantity of bandwidth spent that then does not go into non-electoral organising.
And you’re forgetting, the entire purpose of elections in the first place is as a steam valve within society. An outlet for the build up of anger that would turn into revolutionary energy if not for the elections. You are advocating for something that literally exists for the express purpose of preventing revolution.
This doesn’t magically happen all by itself. It happens as a result of organisers putting the work in to make it happen. It is significantly less likely for it to happen in america where living standards are high compared to any country in the global south where people have considerably more reason to risk their lives and bodies for revolution, and I think you understand that it doesn’t spontaneously occur in the global south either but is instead a product of organisers building it. You don’t have those organisers if they’re dedicated to legitimising electoralism. They believe in its legitimacy. YOU still believe in its legitimacy, although you’re teetering on the edge with some of your rhetoric. Cross that line and commit to it.
I did not consider that angle, but then, my frustration doesn’t actually resolve from ticking a box that I hate. I wouldn’t have guessed that other people might feel differently about that.
Wanting to oppose both genocide supporters is a tantrum?
Not at all! I hate both of them, and take no issue with voicing that. That was meant more as a comparison that not even vocal protest would change the fucked-up fact that one of them is going to be in power, precisely because the system is rigged against such influence.
Though I do believe that the lesser evil is preferable until change from outside the system enables actually good options to gain a foothold. In my opinion, one of them is less bad, and voting for him to stall for time is a reasonable option while other efforts are made to eventually render the vote entirely obsolete.
None of which is actually true.
Not voting isn’t supporting whatever candidate for the same reason piracy isn’t stealing: The intersection of people who’d have bought it if they couldn’t pirate is never everyone and there’s a myriad factors involved. Piracy can be reduced by localised pricing and easier access, whereas hunting down pirates doesn’t help. Same approach works in politics.
People aren’t ideological dots on the plane of ideologies, with a probability distribution in a circle around that point. Politics as a whole can’t be described by a set of coordinates. If you’ve got a large wheel that turns only in one direction, in the long run the torque you apply won’t make a difference, you can’t revert it.
More inportant than these two combined is that it’s all perceptions. On the base level it’s not a given that the 2nd place was truly closer to winning than the 3rd. It is in the case of the US president, but not on the smaller, more local scale. Nobody’s vote is actually locked in and even the voters of the top 2 choices are rarely as inflexible as they’re portrayed. The deeper issue of perception is that the media landscape determines how people think. As near as 4 years ago I wouldn’t have goven much credit to this myself, but the treatment of Sanders and Corbyn show beyond doubt that sustained media campaigns still work wonders and that a lot of assumptions are just horseshit. Consider, Bernie Sanders is possibly the only presidential hopeful in the US who won the first 3 states and still wasn’t made candidate. The media always talks about momentum, but momentum isn’t a point boost from election results, it’s coverage after the fact. Winning Nevada by a landslide means fuckall if the media that’s nominally friendly can’t shut up about how some old sellout is going to support your corpse of an opponent.
That’s the rule of capital, a fact that’s unprofitable need not be true, until it becomes profitable.
You’re reintroducing complexity into my simplified example and making very valid points about external factors influencing decisions, but I’d like to hear your argument for how the Spoiler Effect isn’t real.
The comparison with piracy falls flat because one is a personal entertainment with limited effect where inaction merely affect your ability to enjoy the game, the other is a political affair where even inaction can have consequences on others.
The spoiler effect is real in FPTP when voting for a third party instead of your preferred major party. When you include not voting in the model, you’re effectively including the option to not vote as an option on the hypothetical ballot. The problem with this is that it changes how votes are counted, making one of the “candidate”’s votes all count for nothing. It’s now a different system with different properties. So the spoiler effect for that candidate disappears unless you get into counting opportunity costs, but accounting for opportunity cost brings into the realm of just arguing against FPTP, which I agree with.
I think it’s worth mentioning that voting is fundamentally a last resort for when consensus building is too slow or won’t scale to the desired population. I think it’s also worth mentioning that liberal democracy is essentially democracy by and for the bourgeoisie, and was certainly not designed by people who had access to Arrow’s Theorem or anything of the sort. So the mathematical issues of which voting systems are good for which types of consensus are really separate from the social and economic issues of political shells and class war. And all in all, I think FPTP has done wonders for maintaining the two party system in the US, which itself has done wonders for maintaining bourgeois control.
Agreement in all points.
I found another way to sum up my point in the meantime: Not voting means that you let the rest decide, and effectively give your assent to their decision in advance. Spoiler voting may hurt your preferred major party. Hence, voting for that major party is the most reasonable choice within the boundaries of the election.
But outside of it, FPTP and the liberal bourgeoisie should just take a fucking hike.
I’ve always seen it the other way, that casting your vote is giving consent to follow the final decision. Personally, I live in a blue state, I work 2 jobs, I have a sizable family including extended family to take care of, and I don’t get enough time off to go wait for hours at my polling station. So I do mail in voting and leave most of the national races blank because my state also does winner-take-all. I still believe voting locally can help in harm reduction and facilitate organizing. I just don’t think it’s ever going to lead to revolution in the imperial core.
I’m reserving judgement on the working class mass movements happening in the periphery because their electoral components are genuinely backed by those mass movements. Maybe that’s naive of me given the US’s involvement in elections and coups in Latin America, for example, but I need some hope sometimes I guess. And also I’m from the US and don’t feel like I have a right to criticize those movements’ tactics.
Someone not voting for you is YOUR failure, not the voter’s failure. Earn their vote or piss off.
The electorate didn’t fail you, you failed the electorate.
stfu votecel
Death to America
Thanks for your polite and productive contribution! I understand your argument much more clearly now, and I deeply appreciate you disregarding Hanlon’s Razor and assuming malice rather than ignorance. I’m sure that’s the way to create a better and more friendly society.
Death to America is based tho. Oligarchic Superpowers ought to be destroyed.