No, this is not how it works. Please look up the spoiler effect.
I can’t vote because I don’t live there, but am in the imperial core of countries, so it would be very nice to not have fascists in charge, considering we literally have prosecuted whistleblowers reporting on warcrimes at the behest of the US government. We’re your little bitches whether we like it or not.
Y’all really do need to be hyper-focused on pushing for sweeping electoral reform, for sure.
In the meantime though, voting for a 3rd party under your system is basically a vote for the person you don’t want.
Vote Biden if you would dislike having Trump more. If you don’t want to do that, then yeah, you’re basically admitting you’re cool with the outcome of Trump presidency.
Please don’t waste your vote, your vassals beg you.
Look up the spoiler effect. Please! This vassal is begging you.
The question under your system (please inform yourself about first-past-the-post) isn’t who do you want to win, it’s who you do you want NOT to win.
If you vote for your third-party candidate, it’s equivalent to not having voted at all, if they have no chance of winning.
You’re going to get Biden or Trump with how people vote (spoiler effect, look it up), one of those is going to win, make your peace with that.
So, which would you rather?
I am happy to spell out in greater detail why voting for a third party candidate is a waste of time under your system, happy to chat if there’s still any confusion about it.
If you lived somewhere with a decent preferential voting system, you’d be right.
You don’t though, and it’s not misinformation to say that under a first part the post system, voting for a third candidate that is not going to win is a waste of the influence you have. CGPGrey explains it well
Then Ms 8h account with their full name (deeeeefinitelty not a shill, deeeefinitelt a genuine user. Yeah people on Lemmy toooootally use their full name as if it were facebook), I’ll just have to conclude you’re trying to sway leftists not to vote for Biden, so the world ends up with trump.
🤦♂️ It’s a “law” in the mathematical/scientific sense. It is a model that explains something.
You’re just spouting smart sounding words without actually proving anything.
Please, please, do explain how the spoiler effect is wrong.
Tell me how when you have first past the post and a two party system, voting for a third candidate who won’t win isn’t just making it more likely the candidate you’d like less to win.
Please, would love to hear you well reasoned and sound argument.
Okay 👍 Please do explain your whacky logic though. I came to the conclusion you’re a troll because you’re not really engaging by explaining your position beyond: “I don’t wanna, it’s a lie! The media is lying!!”
Go learn maths, go understand the mechanism behind the spoiler effect. Go look at the literal mountains of examples of it in play. Unless you think it’s just some massive coincidence that every first-past-the-post system trends towards two parties.
I’m very keen and willing hear to any actual logic you bring to the table to justify your belief.
The evidence is all of the first past the post systems that trend toward two dominant parties. There are 1000s of example elections, and the elections which don’t conform to this are just as bad, because the winner will win with even FEWER votes than 50%. If you have 5 candidates and people are voting fairly evenly between them, you can win with just over 20% of the vote. I hope you can believe that, that’s just the mathematical reality (that I’m really hoping we don’t have to debate over, it’s a fairly simple mathematical problem).
The myth is that what you have can actually provide voters with a meaningful choice. That’s the media narrative, that first past the post is meaningful and gives the president a mandate because people voted for them, but it most certainly doesn’t.
Sorry, that’s my bad. Your initial response was quite frustrating.
Emotions are high because this election affects people around the world, and hearing that you don’t care enough to make a difference, is not very pleasant.
Do you think anyone other than Biden or Trump will win? If you do, then your choice is clear, and as much as you question the existence of the spoiler effect (which is not being spread much by the media in the US, it’s being spread by detractors of the current voting system), it doesn’t really matter. People will vote towards those two candidates (hope we can agree that this is the likely outcome).
If that’s the case, voting for a third candidate is as good as not voting because if your candidate doesn’t win, and you COULD have voted for your next choice (why ranked voting is so much better, and it’s the voting system letting you down), then the candidate you most don’t want (assuming 3 candidates) has a better chance of winning (since you didn’t vote for your second choice).
You say this isn’t provable because it’s about people’s beliefs and it can’t be tested, but sorry, elections are about human choices, beliefs are at play. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that democracies with ranked choice voting have more first preference votes to smaller parties, and that it’s overwhelmingly so.
You can’t really escape the fact that even if people just voted for their favourite candidate in first past the post, people would win with less than 50% of the vote (unless you’re saying that the votes don’t add up to 100% then I dunno what to say)
Okay, the test would be that we have first past the post (single winner elections, like for president, or local electorates with single candidates elected, not proportional voting, which is better), produce elections with a spread of votes across many candidates, and don’t consistently trend towards two.
This is definitely testable and disprovable, it’s just that the outcome is overwhelmingly the case I have described, the spoiler effect leading to two dominant parties. There may be outliers and times where a third candidate does win, but these are the overwhelmingly rare exceptions.
For sure, I wouldn’t like voting for either, also.
Just that if they’re not equal, then that means you have a preference. And I hope you will act on that preference and make a difference, instead or just making yourself feel good that you’ve voted for the candidate you liked best.
You’ve been robbed of that choice by your voting system.
I’m not explaining away exceptions, they’re called outliers. In any set of data there will be deviations. When I want to plot some viscosity data and get a few random points on my chart that don’t line up with the rest of the curve, I’m still very confident that my curve is close to being accurate, as long as I have enough data points.
We have enough data points on first past the post elections.
For it to be disproven you would show first past the post elections don’t have to two party systems in the vast majority of cases (which isn’t the reality).
Now, you can try and handwave this away by saying, “oh but that’s what people were TOLD TO BELIEVE, so you can’t prove it”. That’s why we have not just the correlation to rely on, we have maths.
And you can’t (I hope you don’t) really disagree that you either have many candidates, who then win with less than a majority, or two parties, which then necessarily means the third smaller candidates can’t win, and so people then vote for one of the larger parties so their vote counts. That’s the binary state of affairs, there are no other options, the reality of maths doesn’t allow for anything else, the votes add up to 100% ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Well I suppose for voters like you, then yeah, go vote for your candidate. Just seems odd that you’re saying you don’t think their equally bad, but instead of then making a difference to ensure the less bad option wins, you’d rather make yourself feel good for voting for someone you like best.
May the gods have mercy on us mere vassals who are watching from the sidelines.
Stay safe in these troubled times friend, and thanks for engaging, even if at times it got a bit heated and apologies for offence caused.
I’m not saying we need more data though, we have the data, plurality voting overwhelming results in two party systems. This is disprovable and I’m totally happy to change my mind based on the evidence and data.
I’m not straw-manning, you said before with regards to looking up the spoiler effect “I have. it’s not a natural phenomenon, it’s a story that the media tells.”
Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying there.
This is a problem I’d very much like governments to sink a bit of money into. Sure, we don’t have 100% efficient energy storage, but we certainly have technology that does the job. Liquid air energy storage, fly wheels, thermal sand batteries etc, can be installed anywhere and are available right now. Not to mention pumped hydro if you have suitable terrain.
There’s a lot of stuff that we could build, and honestly, we just need to build it, now, even if it’s not profitable, or super efficient. There’s a bunch of solar and wind around the world not being built, or curtailed because prices go negative when there’s no one to store it.
The free market sucks. We need government intervention to do the things the profit motive won’t.
Y’all need to just stop it with voting machines USA. Pencil and paper is far more secure.
I’m not doubting that trump wasn’t elected, reality has a left-wing bias, but damn, what if voting machines are hacked, or have a backdoor built-in in the future.
Reminder... (lemmy.world)
Reminder... (lemmy.world)
me_irl (lemmy.world)
Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory (markets.businessinsider.com)
Smartmatic alleges Newsmax has deleted evidence in lawsuit over false vote-rigging claims (www.nbcnews.com)