6 ms·

"We" didn't vote for this. A bit less than 25% of us voted for it, a bit more than 25% voted against it, and nearly 50% of us didn't bother to vote at all. (3rd

"We" didn't vote for this. A bit less than 25% of us voted for it, a bit more than 25% voted against it, and nearly 50% of us didn't bother to vote at all. (3rd parties got a small number of votes in the middle there too.) Neither of the major parties has a majority, or anything like a "mandate" about what the American people want. The majority wants "none of the above". If anyone figures out how to get that majority motivated to vote for them, they'll sweep the election.

wvenable 8y ago
The 50% of people who didn't vote basically have said, we don't care to choose. So they got exactly what they voted for.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Or they didn't see a viable candidate that represented their interests and decided to abstain. This is a legal right.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    Your interests are going to be represented by one of the two major party candidates, whether you like it or not. And even if you're firmly on the side of "do not like," one of those candidates is almost certainly going to be less worse than the other. Maybe you think both of them have authoritarian tendencies, but only one of them openly talks about the press as the enemy of the people and tacitly encourages their followers to demonize and harass their opponents. Maybe you want universal health care and neither of the candidates support it, but one of them talks about shoring up and expanding the Affordable Care Act and the other one talks about repealing it. Maybe you think both of them are too beholden to Wall Street, but only one of them literally lives in a gold-plated penthouse a couple blocks away. So, sure, it's your legal right not to vote. But it's my legal right to point out that by doing so, you are not nobly opting out of the system -- you're supporting the winner.
    - cf498 8y ago
      If you are voting for someone in a representative system they are acting in your name and their action are your responsibility. Not to mention that you give legitimacy to such a system by participating in it and help it to perpetuate itself. Then again, supporting the lesser evil might be reasonable in some situations, but that doesnt get you out of the responsibility of the actions of the lesser evil. Voting is a lot like the Trolley problem.
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      It's the candidates job to win my vote. If neither win my vote what am I supposed to do? Vote for someone I don't like at all? Why should I have to do that? People who don't vote have been roughly 45-50% of the voting bloc in recent history [1]. As a Democratic Socialist learning towards Socialist, neither Hillary nor Trump represented really any of my views. Pretty much none at all to be honest. Both were terrible people, and terrible candidates. [1] http://www.electproject.org/2016g http://www.electproject.org/2016g
      - khazhou 8y ago
        There wasn't even a single issue you agreed with either Hillary or Trump on? Because even if there was just one thing you cared about and which only one side supported, then by your stated principle that both parties are (otherwise) the same, then you should have voted for that. Or... even if both sides were pro-war, pro-big-business, anti-worker, whatever, you could have still voted against the undignified office-demeaning racist.
        prolikewh0a 8y ago
        One thing that I agree with isn't enough to get me to drop my morals and vote in favor of endless wars, low wages, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable college, keeping marijuana illegal, privatization of our schools, more oil drilling & fracking, more income inequality, more anti-union rhetoric, doing the favors of Wall St., surveillance state, etc. I voted for Obama in 2012, and even though his public image was fantastic, I feel as if the blood from everything that was kept out of public view is on my hands. I won't make that mistake again.
  - e40 8y ago
    Yes, because as we all know, both sides are exactly the same. /s
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      What are they different on that makes the lives of everyday Americans better? Abortion? LGBT rights? They're both war & business parties and practically do exactly the same things. They both sell out the worker in favor of the establishment. Once you expand your knowledge of political ideologies outside of USA's acceptable overton window, you get a true sense of just how close both parties actually are.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        "Both parties are the same" made sense in 2000, when there were two generic white guys running, if you were too young to remember Watergate or Iran-Contra much, and also because the trillion dollar wars and deficits to come were unimaginable. After the invasion of Iraq, let alone the ACA, and what's happened post 2016, it seems to me like hollow propaganda. It's fundamentally no longer possible to have a productive discussion when you can't get to the point of believing your counterpart is sincere about anything.
        prolikewh0a 8y ago
        >two generic white guys running Two generic white people ran in 2016. Obama left in 6 or 7 wars/major conflicts. He dropped 26000 bombs in 2016 alone [1]. He used the espionage act against journalists more than any president in history [2]. He let protestors get their heads smashed in by oil companies in North Dakota right before he left [3]. He expanded the surveillance state [4]. Obama seemed sincere and then ended up selling out the American people even further. Schumer wont whip the vote to block Kavanaugh [5]. Democrats recently overwhelmingly backed the largest defense budget in US history [6]. It still makes sense. It's not "hollow propaganda". Both parties are war, oil, and business parties. Neither are in favor of helping the worker. [1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016 https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-dr... [2] https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10/jake-tapper/cnns-tapper-obama-has-used-espionage-act-more-all-/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/dakota-access-pipeline-water-cannon-police-standing-rock-protest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/dakota-acces... [4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill... [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/schumer-plays-long-game-avoids-hardball-with-centrist-democrats-over-supreme-court-pick/2018/07/27/f3fb86dc-90d2-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/schumer-plays-long-... [6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/06/20/house-and-senate-democrats-vote-68-percent-and-85-percent-for-massive-military-spending/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/06/20/house-an...
- fragsworth 8y ago
  No, because of the electoral college, in states like California where your vote doesn't matter as much (because nearly everyone votes democrat) the turnout is lower. It's not apathy when your vote literally isn't worth as much as someone else's, as evidenced by the fact that the number of votes didn't even determine the election.
  - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
    I don't disagree, but this it partially the fault of the leadership of the House of Representatives. If they wanted to increase the voting power of Californians, then they'd repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that caps the number of representatives at 435 and reapportion based on the Constitutionally suggested 30,000 people per representative in the House, which would equalize the weight of each Californian's vote by increasing the number of electors.
  - dbatten 8y ago
    You vote on more than just the president, though... you still have an opportunity to get your voice heard. Admittedly, as a statement of fact, it's plausible/likely that the electoral college reduces turnout because presidential elections get people excited (especially when they know their state is in play), but that's not usually a rational response. You still get to vote for congress, state government, ballot initiatives, etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
  People often spin refusing to vote as an explicit rejection of the current system, but I've always seen it as an implicit acceptance of the current system. By refusing to vote you are implicitly trusting the other voters to choose for you, so you get what they pick and have absolutely no right to complain about it.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  Or if they missed the time at work it would have taken to vote, they'd lose their job and can't feed their family. Election day is not a national holiday
- mindslight 8y ago
  Actually, the 50% of people who didn't vote in the presidential election have said we don't care to choose between which of the two pieces of shit we're going to be forced to eat, and we're not going to legitimize our own oppression by helping pretend its consensual. If Kodos had been elected, this likely would not be happening at the EPA (nor that shitshow over at the FCC). But other similarly destructive corruption would certainly be, depending on what her specific sponsors had purchased. The industries' agendas are written years in advance, the skinjobs' role is merely to sell them, and the act of voting is a major step to getting your mindshare. Go try talking to a Trump supporter about the direct objectively bad results of his policies, on topics they ostensibly care about - eg tariffs that encourage even more manufacturing to move to China. You will find that they basically just fall back on cognitive dissonance from having chosen him and therefore having bought in to his reality distortion field.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Actually, the 50% of people who didn't vote in the presidential election have said we don't care to choose between which of the two pieces of shit we're going to be forced to eat If they had voted in the primaries, they would have different choices, but 71% of those eligible to vote in primaries didn't bother (Turnout was only 29% of those eligible in the 2016 primaries). [0] So, cutting the field back to those “two pieces of shit” didn't drive people away. The poor set of general election choices is a product of apathy, not it's cause. [0] https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Ffairvote.box.com%2Fv%2FPrimaryVoterTurnout2008-2016 https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Ffairvote.box.com...
    - mindslight 8y ago
      Stepping back to the primaries is fallacious, as it just obscures the criticism. For 2016 we can easily see that the top-level choices were bullshit. But condemning the process that led to the Democratic primary choices is more amorphous, making it easier to cling to belief. Rather than retreating to lower layers of the recursive structure, it's more productive to discuss models that cover the whole system - my working one is that there is a general gradient whereby the candidates that have (or adopt) views more palatable to entrenched interests receive more support, both funding and institutional. And that support is the primary factor of how far they make it - both election-wise, and how much they "get done" in office. > The poor set of general election choices is a product of apathy, not it's cause. The people voting for the popular-corruption candidates look pretty damn non-apathetic to me. I've never understood this idea that if only more people were voting, the process would get more intelligent. I can only think it is wishful thinking by people who are aware of their own struggle between antipathy and capitulation. You hope that if the disinterested suddenly decided to vote, they would all vote in what you consider the intelligent way. And with those numbers, you could have voted for your real choice instead of the one you've resigned yourself to. But, like the idea of gas molecules spontaneously all moving in one direction, it just does not work that way.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
  Just because a candidate had a stated (or misstated or unstated) viewpoint doesn't mean a vote for that candidate is a vote for that viewpoint. That's not how any representative-elected political system has ever worked.
- chiefofgxbxl 8y ago
  Blaming people who didn't vote is a strange thing. For one, it ignores any practical barriers to voting. Maybe someone was working an hourly job with no flexibility to make it to the polls that particular day. Also, the status-quo of our political system is also in play. What about someone living outside of one of the 6 swing states and their vote wouldn't have likely made a difference. Consider New York State: a Democratic voter may skip with the knowledge that the state will absolutely go blue, and a Republican voter may feel their vote is in vain because the state will go blue anyway. Shouldn't it be the people who cast their votes who are held accountable for the individuals they put in office? For this I leave you with George Carlin's explanation on the matter [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk

wvenable 8y ago

The 50% of people who didn't vote basically have said, we don't care to choose. So they got exactly what they voted for.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
Or they didn't see a viable candidate that represented their interests and decided to abstain. This is a legal right.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Your interests are going to be represented by one of the two major party candidates, whether you like it or not. And even if you're firmly on the side of "do not like," one of those candidates is almost certainly going to be less worse than the other. Maybe you think both of them have authoritarian tendencies, but only one of them openly talks about the press as the enemy of the people and tacitly encourages their followers to demonize and harass their opponents. Maybe you want universal health care and neither of the candidates support it, but one of them talks about shoring up and expanding the Affordable Care Act and the other one talks about repealing it. Maybe you think both of them are too beholden to Wall Street, but only one of them literally lives in a gold-plated penthouse a couple blocks away. So, sure, it's your legal right not to vote. But it's my legal right to point out that by doing so, you are not nobly opting out of the system -- you're supporting the winner.
  - cf498 8y ago
    If you are voting for someone in a representative system they are acting in your name and their action are your responsibility. Not to mention that you give legitimacy to such a system by participating in it and help it to perpetuate itself. Then again, supporting the lesser evil might be reasonable in some situations, but that doesnt get you out of the responsibility of the actions of the lesser evil. Voting is a lot like the Trolley problem.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    It's the candidates job to win my vote. If neither win my vote what am I supposed to do? Vote for someone I don't like at all? Why should I have to do that? People who don't vote have been roughly 45-50% of the voting bloc in recent history [1]. As a Democratic Socialist learning towards Socialist, neither Hillary nor Trump represented really any of my views. Pretty much none at all to be honest. Both were terrible people, and terrible candidates. [1] http://www.electproject.org/2016g http://www.electproject.org/2016g
    - khazhou 8y ago
      There wasn't even a single issue you agreed with either Hillary or Trump on? Because even if there was just one thing you cared about and which only one side supported, then by your stated principle that both parties are (otherwise) the same, then you should have voted for that. Or... even if both sides were pro-war, pro-big-business, anti-worker, whatever, you could have still voted against the undignified office-demeaning racist.
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        One thing that I agree with isn't enough to get me to drop my morals and vote in favor of endless wars, low wages, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable college, keeping marijuana illegal, privatization of our schools, more oil drilling & fracking, more income inequality, more anti-union rhetoric, doing the favors of Wall St., surveillance state, etc. I voted for Obama in 2012, and even though his public image was fantastic, I feel as if the blood from everything that was kept out of public view is on my hands. I won't make that mistake again.
- e40 8y ago
  Yes, because as we all know, both sides are exactly the same. /s
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    What are they different on that makes the lives of everyday Americans better? Abortion? LGBT rights? They're both war & business parties and practically do exactly the same things. They both sell out the worker in favor of the establishment. Once you expand your knowledge of political ideologies outside of USA's acceptable overton window, you get a true sense of just how close both parties actually are.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      "Both parties are the same" made sense in 2000, when there were two generic white guys running, if you were too young to remember Watergate or Iran-Contra much, and also because the trillion dollar wars and deficits to come were unimaginable. After the invasion of Iraq, let alone the ACA, and what's happened post 2016, it seems to me like hollow propaganda. It's fundamentally no longer possible to have a productive discussion when you can't get to the point of believing your counterpart is sincere about anything.
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        >two generic white guys running Two generic white people ran in 2016. Obama left in 6 or 7 wars/major conflicts. He dropped 26000 bombs in 2016 alone [1]. He used the espionage act against journalists more than any president in history [2]. He let protestors get their heads smashed in by oil companies in North Dakota right before he left [3]. He expanded the surveillance state [4]. Obama seemed sincere and then ended up selling out the American people even further. Schumer wont whip the vote to block Kavanaugh [5]. Democrats recently overwhelmingly backed the largest defense budget in US history [6]. It still makes sense. It's not "hollow propaganda". Both parties are war, oil, and business parties. Neither are in favor of helping the worker. [1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016 https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-dr... [2] https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10/jake-tapper/cnns-tapper-obama-has-used-espionage-act-more-all-/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/dakota-access-pipeline-water-cannon-police-standing-rock-protest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/dakota-acces... [4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill... [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/schumer-plays-long-game-avoids-hardball-with-centrist-democrats-over-supreme-court-pick/2018/07/27/f3fb86dc-90d2-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/schumer-plays-long-... [6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/06/20/house-and-senate-democrats-vote-68-percent-and-85-percent-for-massive-military-spending/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/06/20/house-an...
fragsworth 8y ago
No, because of the electoral college, in states like California where your vote doesn't matter as much (because nearly everyone votes democrat) the turnout is lower. It's not apathy when your vote literally isn't worth as much as someone else's, as evidenced by the fact that the number of votes didn't even determine the election.
- cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
  I don't disagree, but this it partially the fault of the leadership of the House of Representatives. If they wanted to increase the voting power of Californians, then they'd repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that caps the number of representatives at 435 and reapportion based on the Constitutionally suggested 30,000 people per representative in the House, which would equalize the weight of each Californian's vote by increasing the number of electors.
- dbatten 8y ago
  You vote on more than just the president, though... you still have an opportunity to get your voice heard. Admittedly, as a statement of fact, it's plausible/likely that the electoral college reduces turnout because presidential elections get people excited (especially when they know their state is in play), but that's not usually a rational response. You still get to vote for congress, state government, ballot initiatives, etc.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
People often spin refusing to vote as an explicit rejection of the current system, but I've always seen it as an implicit acceptance of the current system. By refusing to vote you are implicitly trusting the other voters to choose for you, so you get what they pick and have absolutely no right to complain about it.
mrguyorama 8y ago
Or if they missed the time at work it would have taken to vote, they'd lose their job and can't feed their family. Election day is not a national holiday
mindslight 8y ago
Actually, the 50% of people who didn't vote in the presidential election have said we don't care to choose between which of the two pieces of shit we're going to be forced to eat, and we're not going to legitimize our own oppression by helping pretend its consensual. If Kodos had been elected, this likely would not be happening at the EPA (nor that shitshow over at the FCC). But other similarly destructive corruption would certainly be, depending on what her specific sponsors had purchased. The industries' agendas are written years in advance, the skinjobs' role is merely to sell them, and the act of voting is a major step to getting your mindshare. Go try talking to a Trump supporter about the direct objectively bad results of his policies, on topics they ostensibly care about - eg tariffs that encourage even more manufacturing to move to China. You will find that they basically just fall back on cognitive dissonance from having chosen him and therefore having bought in to his reality distortion field.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Actually, the 50% of people who didn't vote in the presidential election have said we don't care to choose between which of the two pieces of shit we're going to be forced to eat If they had voted in the primaries, they would have different choices, but 71% of those eligible to vote in primaries didn't bother (Turnout was only 29% of those eligible in the 2016 primaries). [0] So, cutting the field back to those “two pieces of shit” didn't drive people away. The poor set of general election choices is a product of apathy, not it's cause. [0] https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Ffairvote.box.com%2Fv%2FPrimaryVoterTurnout2008-2016 https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Ffairvote.box.com...
  - mindslight 8y ago
    Stepping back to the primaries is fallacious, as it just obscures the criticism. For 2016 we can easily see that the top-level choices were bullshit. But condemning the process that led to the Democratic primary choices is more amorphous, making it easier to cling to belief. Rather than retreating to lower layers of the recursive structure, it's more productive to discuss models that cover the whole system - my working one is that there is a general gradient whereby the candidates that have (or adopt) views more palatable to entrenched interests receive more support, both funding and institutional. And that support is the primary factor of how far they make it - both election-wise, and how much they "get done" in office. > The poor set of general election choices is a product of apathy, not it's cause. The people voting for the popular-corruption candidates look pretty damn non-apathetic to me. I've never understood this idea that if only more people were voting, the process would get more intelligent. I can only think it is wishful thinking by people who are aware of their own struggle between antipathy and capitulation. You hope that if the disinterested suddenly decided to vote, they would all vote in what you consider the intelligent way. And with those numbers, you could have voted for your real choice instead of the one you've resigned yourself to. But, like the idea of gas molecules spontaneously all moving in one direction, it just does not work that way.
TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
Just because a candidate had a stated (or misstated or unstated) viewpoint doesn't mean a vote for that candidate is a vote for that viewpoint. That's not how any representative-elected political system has ever worked.
chiefofgxbxl 8y ago
Blaming people who didn't vote is a strange thing. For one, it ignores any practical barriers to voting. Maybe someone was working an hourly job with no flexibility to make it to the polls that particular day. Also, the status-quo of our political system is also in play. What about someone living outside of one of the 6 swing states and their vote wouldn't have likely made a difference. Consider New York State: a Democratic voter may skip with the knowledge that the state will absolutely go blue, and a Republican voter may feel their vote is in vain because the state will go blue anyway. Shouldn't it be the people who cast their votes who are held accountable for the individuals they put in office? For this I leave you with George Carlin's explanation on the matter [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk