I used to think voting was wrong.
Quick aside to those who stalwarts of democracy who gasp in horror at the notion of not doing your duty of putting a ballot in a box: don’t worry, this text is gonna end up arguing for voting, not against it.
Here’s what I was thinking back then: if my candidate wins and they do something evil, that’s my fault because I voted for them. But if my candidate’s opponent wins and they do something bad, that’s also my fault because I participated in, and thereby signed off on, the process that put them on the throne.
If I say “sure, let’s flip for it”, I can’t complain when it ends up tails and I don’t get what I want. If I say “sure, let’s duel at noon, I approve of that way of resolving things”, it’s kind of on me if I then get shot and die. By participating in electoral democracy, I would make myself responsible for what the elected representatives did. That was my thinking at the time.
I’ve changed my mind on this. I’m still definitively not saying that voting should be the main focus of our political engagement.
But I’ve freed myself from thinking “if I vote, the elected representatives’ actions and choices are my fault”. Instead, I see it as harm reduction. I don’t wanna vote for the guy who’s gonna do bad things but if I don’t, the other guy who’s gonna do those same bad things plus a couple of other bad things on top is gonna win.
It’s less that I am saying “yes, good idea, dueling to the death to determine this issue is a reasonable and binding way of settling disputes” and more that I’m saying “holy shit! They’re shooting at us, take cover!”
Here in Sweden, they aren’t counting up blank and protest votes or abstains and going “hmm, a lot of blank votes, we’d better resign”. They only count the votes for registered candidates and then select the candidate with the most votes. There’s no way to “un”-vote.
In America, it’s especially bad because they have a first-past-the-post system. There’s no way for three candidates to be viable (which means that there’s no way for three parties to be viable, which means that primaries are deathly important). Yes, America desperately needs election reform.
In France, there is run-off voting. You get to both have the cake of voting for who’s gonna be the best, and then eat the cake of even if your favorite lost, you can keep the most evil out of power. I’m so jealous of this and I urge everyone to please help keep the fachos out!
Sweden has proportional representation, so the elected representatives can be a mix of different parties, but there is a problem. The threshold percent rule (four percent in Sweden, other countries have different numbers). This is needed—it’s so that all parliamentarians will have enough to actually do meaningful work, which in Sweden comes down to a little over a dozen seats—but it sucks because of your party gets less than four percent, you wasted your vote. We would need a runoff or instant runoff, too: vote for a couple of parties and if your fave gets less than four percent, you get your second choice.
We’re also seeing the downside to proportional rep here, since that means that we’re letting some amount of monsters inside the parliament, and I have a hard time making peace with that.
Sometimes it’s pretty frustrating thinking about election systems since not only are fair elections impossible, even if we did have fair elections, people would still vote for some pretty bad policies. But let’s make the best of the world as it is (without giving up on saving it), and please vote.
One is worse than the other. And I’m not excusing Darmanin and his domestic racism and his support for the hafrada policies. But we can’t swap out RN lite for the actual RN.
So what I mean is that I used to think “I don’t want to participate and become responsible for a bad representative”. I was opposed to voting for the lesser evil. But now I don’t feel that way anymore. I no longer see voting as expressing approval or support of the candidate. Voting sucks and the government is not legimitate but this is harm reduction. We can have RN lite (in the form of REM) or we can have the actual RN which would be (slightly) worse. I don’t want worse!
If this was instant or automatic runoff (like IRV or Star), if you would’ve ranked RN below REM (even slightly), you’d have automatically voted for REM by now. I understand and sympathize that it feels way worse to actually do it in person.
We have nothing to gain from going with the worse option.
It’s like when Sanders lost the American primary and some of his democrat supporters were like “If we have Trump instead—it’s OK that he’s a li’l bit worse, the people will finally realize how bad right wing politics is and rise up” but what happened? The right wing got even more right wing and wack, while the so-called left wing primaried their most conservative and centrist candidate, Joe Biden.
It’s an illusion that we can accept that the most evil is a li’l bit worse than the second-most evil, that the difference is OK. Accepting to get a more evil ruler in order to spite the second-most evil ruler is only hurting ourselves.
I wanna change the perception of voting from being “I approve and accept of this candidate” to “OK, this is tactics and strategy and how-can-we-keep-the-world-from-getting-worse”. Coming from ancom, I was steeped in “boycott the vote”, “direct action”, “strikes and barricades” and I’m not asking for a complete 180˚ turn from that. Instead, I’m saying “the vote is ridiculous, the state is a mess, but the way they are hurting us is real so please try to help push the collective steering this old boat at least a little bit closer to the right direction”.
“It’s too late”—that’s my point exactly! It’s too late this cycle to put an actual good candidate in power (so it seems like we still need to build broader support for our ideas, and also work with political action outside of the parliamentary structures, such as strikes). It’s too late and everything related to putting a good candidate is meaningless. It’s void, it’s moot. We can try to keep the worst candidate out, for whatever that’s worth (and I’m begging you to please, please, please do that), but that’s not the be-all, end-all of our political engagement.
I saw that some folks on Station were not happy about this post.
What I’m trying to say is that in other countries there’s no step one. There’s either no vote or you only get to vote for the lesser evil. There’s no opportunity to try to build something better.
In France you can vote for the good team and campaign for them and then if they do get eliminated, last step is to have to vote for the lesser evil. In other countries thure’s only that last step. That is so incredibly worse.
I’m not trying to say that the lesser-evil candidate in France is not evil. He is very evil. I’m not trying to minimize how much it sucks that each election cycle ends in an incredible downer as you have to vote for someone evil to keep a greater evil out of power.
The oligarchy just has to push fascism as its first opposition to be almost sure to stay in power.
Yes. It sucks how that very powerful tactic has emerged. (I mean, it’s probably emergent rather a deliberate teleological tactic but it sucks nonetheless.) That has been happening all over the world. Unlike other countries your system allows for a solution: voting in a better candidate before the last runoff. So far the electorate as a whole hasn’t been doing that.
First round, lesser-evil guy got more votes than any other candidate and the actual facho got the second most. That’s your problem right there! The electorate isn’t doing its job and that’s not necessarily their own fault directly since education and media (especially social media) is so heavily influenced by oligarchs and fash.
In election science, one big metric of how good an election system is how accurately it expresses the will of the electorate. The US system is very bad at this since “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush”. The French system—as a whole, including both rounds—is not perfect but so much better than almost any other country. But still each French election what do I hear endless litanies about? How bad the election system is. I hear that more than I hear it from other countries, too!
I hear way less about “why the heck did 51% of people vote for one of Macron or Le Pen in the first round, and what can we do about that? Awareness, education, communication, what the heck’s going on with the media/memetic situation that’s causing this?” and way more about “our system sucks”.
Your system sucks because… the most popular candidate won?
And I realize that the people most likely to read this post are the ones that need to hear it the least because they are already working so hard for the good team in round one and to fight the fash and the neolibs on every level, inside and outside of gov’t.
The way the right wing has captured media is a global problem of incredible urgency and I’m incredibly unsuitable to figure out a solution to that since I’m a weirdo who doesn’t use socials and don’t read normal newspapers and only has a handful of IRL friends.