> You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote"

> You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society. So here’s the thing about that. Advertising, marketing, propaganda are effectively the same words but with different connotations, but more importantly they are at their core information which exists in a competitive information environment and can inform voter’s choices (“inform” in the loosest sense, information does not have to be correct by any definition to be informative) which in turn has an effect on their preferences and feeds back into policy choices and the politicians they vote for who are in turn informed by voter preferences, propaganda, advertising, lobbying, privileged information, etc. in a nice tight feedback loop. As I said at the start: > “Regularly and governments live and die on their ability to advertise their policies and propagate their message in a convincing fashion.” This is a given for governance. But knowing that, can you still question the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome if it follows the laws of the political environment in which it is set? I would say “No”. Going back to Prop 22, it was a three position vote for the text of the Proposition in which the three possible choices were to vote “Yes”, vote “No” and not vote. “Yes” won and I always insist that abstaining is abstaining, but others will tend to boil that down to a vote for the winner or a vote for the loser, whichever is more politically convenient at a given moment of time. So perhaps I was overzealous in my reading of your question as the leading edge of a line of rhetoric which questions the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome—I am open to that possibility—but when the tally is taken at the end of a vote, per our laws, that is the outcome barring a pre-emption issue like in the manner AB5 itself was pre-empted by a Federal law as it applies to truckers who are independent contractors. Pre-emption is a legal issue however, the outcome of a vote is always a political issue and interested parties, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash, me, a bunch of others with similar concerns as me who also weren’t entirely happy with how little Prop 22 did but saw it as an acceptable compromise, we were all competing in the same information space as the “No on Prop 22” (formal and informal) people. All that money only gets you a chance to be heard though, and many never even see the ads or the propaganda and just go by the booklet the State mails out. If you can’t convince a majority of interested voters, you’re still going to lose and it just happened to work out for Uber and Lyft this time. Whether it is the “correct” system, it is the lawful system, one of the two in this State, by which we pass laws. Now if you want to talk about problems with ballot propositions, I’m here for that because it’s not a system I actually like either, but I would also be bringing to the table problems I have with California’s entire political system, not just the ballot propositions.