For the editor and anyone else who does not understand math: people voting for Trump means Trump gets a vote.
A vote for Jill Stein means Trump does not get a vote.
Would you rather have someone vote third party or vote Trump?
Ah yes, I remember how protest voting went in 2016
I mean doyee?
No one’s voting 3rd party because they think they’ll win, they’re just throwing away a vote for Harris. Their statement is that they have no issue with another 4 years of Trump because their demands aren’t being met anyway (cough genocide).
You can argue all day about the rationality and lack of utilitarianism, but it won’t change anything.
If MLK were alive, he’d probably vote Democrat because he believes there is a solution in comprise over time, and keeping Republicans out is beneficial to that. (He generally favored the more progressive party).
If Malcolm X were alive, he’d probably be protesting just like the uncommitted group, but choose not to vote if his major demand wasn’t met, because his reasoning would be that any promised or hypothetical solutions would not come to fruition. (The Ballot or the Bullet)
Both have valid reasoning, and it can obviously depend on the situation, but it bugs me that 50 years later people still don’t understand why people choose to vote a certain way.
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection” - MLK
Change won’t come overnight (at least without revolution). Like evolution, it requires constant pressure on the system. Changes that are too radical kill the organism.
A long as people think we can jump from Geoge H.W. Bush to Bernie Sanders in one election it’s going to continue to fail.
Votw Harris this time. Vote for the person slightly more liberal than her next time, etc. It’s a process.
We just got finished fighting a year long battle with the tankies on Lemmy that making the genocide in Gaza their singular issue and abstaining from voting for Kamala is like handing Trump the presidency. It should be a duh doie moment, but sadly it isn’t.
No one’s voting 3rd party because they think they’ll win, they’re just throwing away a vote for Harris.
Would you prefer people voting 3rd party not vote at all?
If Malcolm X were alive
Why Malcolm X’s Family Is Suing the FBI, NYPD, and CIA 58 Years After His Death
Do you seriously think X was pro-FBI? Why on earth would he support a candidate who was?
Did… did you even read what I wrote…?
My point was that he is exactly against the system and playing it by voting for a major party. His whole speech was literally about utilizing your status as a voter in key swing states to demand change from candidates by threatening your power as a voter to choose, regardless of whether you vote 3rd party or not at all.
My point was that he is exactly against the system and playing it by voting for a major party.
That’s not true.
His whole speech was literally about utilizing your status as a voter in key swing states to demand change from candidates by threatening your power as a voter to choose
That’s a wildly inaccurate interpretation
What does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and Black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the dog house.
A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.
Straight from his speech lol.
Both have valid reasoning
I disagree.
Let’s break down this bullshit: A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Jill Stein. The election clerks count ballots marked for Stein and report the vote totals that Stein received. A vote for Jill Stein is literally a vote for Jill Stein.
The statement that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump is, of course, metaphorical. It’s asserting that a vote for Stein is morally equivalent to a vote for Trump by the speaker’s moral reckoning. It’s a rhetorical shortcut. This shortcut rests on the notion that either the voter would have voted for Harris, or that it is a moral imperative to stop Trump above all else.
That’s a moral judgement call. Other people may judge differently. Flatly stating that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump so vehemently and absolutely elides any possibility of discourse and clearly tells the Stein voter that the speaker will not listen to or consider any of their views, or reasons to vote for Stein.
Fine, you believe that, but when has telling people more or less directly that you do not have any intention of considering their political beliefs won them over to your side? How is that a good tactic? If it worked, then why not employ it on Trump supporters? Go ahead, tell them that the party you support will ignore what they think and want, and demand they vote for your candidate.
If it doesn’t work on them, why should it work on Stein voters?
What a bunch of horseshit.
At best, third party voting has led to splitting votes and Woodrow Wilson winning despite having only 41% of the votes and at worst, it’s done absolutely nothing.
This is why a vote for third party is a vote for trump. Because no trump supporter is gonna vote third party. If you’re voting third party, it means one less vote for Harris which means less smaller chance of her winning which means higher chance of trump losing. Anyone saying otherwise is either dumb as fuck or is purposefully trying to split the votes to help trump win.
More accurately, a vote for Stein is a vote for whichever major party candidate the voter wouldn’t have voted for. In most cases, someone voting for the Green Party would vote for Harris, so it’s a vote for Trump.
That isn’t a moral judgement, it’s the facts of a two party system. -1 vote for Harris = +1 vote for Trump, no other votes matter.
And that’s not telling someone you don’t consider their political beliefs. Considering their political beliefs, they should vote for the major party candidate that they agree with the most, or they will effectively be voting for the one they agree with least.
That’s not the approach with Trump supporters because Trump is the major party candidate they agree with most, by definition. If anything one should try to get Trump supporters to vote 3rd party, Libertarian or for RFK or whoever.
What a load of absolute garbage.
Yes, prima facie a vote for Stein is a vote for Stein. Good job moron.
No Trumper/conservative is gonna vote green, so that leaves the pool of Harris voters that Stein is taking from.
Pretty basic understanding here.
If a Stein voter won’t be swayed, then this discourse isn’t for them so why even state it here? If someone is thinking of voting for Stein and can be swayed, let me simply say that if they vote for Stein they will get Trump. Remember, Steiners come from the lefty pool, not the righty pool.
Hope those self-righteous voters spend as much energy in off years protesting and making change locally, otherwise they’re hypocrites.
Nailed it… Probably gonna catch a lot of down votes from lib shills… But fuck 'em, this is exactly right. Honestly, I think any of these bullshit articles that will clearly push people further away must be part of the plan to help Trump… Or are the libs really still just this stupid? Have learned absolutely nothing from all their time losing
Fucking thank you for saying it.
(and for saying it more eloquently than I have been able to.)
Who is this article for?
It doesn’t address the real problem here: That first past the post voting is a broken system and that main party candidates should make more effort to fix this glaring hole in the voting system.
Because fptp is garbage, third parties are little more than a method to undermine a candidates opposition (in the US in 2024 the green party is ironically propped up in part by the republican party)
By leaving out fptp it just sounds like anti democracy drivel.
I wish we had ranked choice voting, it just makes so much more sense
Most all Harris voters agree things need to be changed.
We also agree that NOW is not the time for that. Just, let’s make sure the orange man stays out of power first before arguing what to change.
first past the post voting is a broken system and that main party candidates should make more effort to fix this glaring hole in the voting system.
The Democratic Party would rather lose to the Republican Party than change the rules to allow for a multi-party system.
That aside, the major parties don’t want to reform the system they have because it’s worked very well for them. Our parties are incredibly old by world standards. The Democrats have been around since the 18th century, and the Republicans have been around since the 1850s.
Some level of election reform will be on the ballot in 9 states this fall. Make sure you vote, if you can!
Also worth noting that these efforts are generally led mainly by democrats, with support from some moderate republicans. In contrast, 10 republican-led state legistatures have passed outright bans on RCV. One of these parties is not like the other!
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/05/nx-s1-4969563/ranked-choice-voting-bans
The democrats supported RCV in my state.
The Democratic Party would rather lose to the Republican Party than change the rules to allow for a multi-party system.
That’s a weird false dichotomy. Why are you painting those as the two options?
The problem is if you believe this entirely then there’s no mechanism to affect parties. Which is easy to disprove.
The overarching reality is that the parties are affected by things: culturally there’s been a long period (150 years) of slowly unrestricting people with lots of resistance. Then there’s also a economic right wing drift for decades, largely along capital accumulation lines.
I buy the idea that the parties are hard to affect but the idea they are impossible to affect seems ahistorical.
Lol there’s definitely a way to affect them.
Two actually.
One is $$$$
The other one you aren’t allowed to propose.
?There’s several ways to affect politics
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Corruption - largely the higher corruption is the more advocates to lower taxes for their donors. This is driven by capital accumulation.
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Bottom up struggles - largely if a number of states do a thing the federal politicians will pick it up. Voting rights, marijuana legalization etc fall into this. Realistically this is probably the way to pick up votes.
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Media driven - Trump is primarily influenced this way with scares, fear, bullshit. The last 40 years are driven heavily by media scares funded by right wing billionaires. Factual information sometimes breaks through here: I would argue the obamacare ban on pre-existing conditions was the outcome of a media cycle. Usually these are bad rather than good.
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Personal affectations of politicians. Cheney’s daughter caused him to be sensible on gay rights, McCain’s stance on torture was a result of his time as a POW. George Bush’s daddy issues about Iraq lead to millions of people dying. If enough people shoot at trump I do see him passing gun legislation (not encouraging it, just speculation)
Indeed politics is a tea kettle in the Lagrange zone between the earth and the moon.
But I was suggesting methods for affecting political parties.
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In California, it doesn’t matter because the results are already known. In other states the calculus is a bit different.
Online rhetoric sways voters in swing states. Your vote may not change the outcome, but your words might.
That’s absolutely true, especially for a paper like the LA Times. I am dubious that there is any appreciable effect when it comes to random blogs and so forth.
Right? Imagine believing there are enough conscientious progressives / leftists to flip CA red because of third party voting. Sure, Jan.
If you think casting any ballot is a form of protest you need to learn what real protest looks like.
Hint: It doesn’t involve participating in the system you’re protesting.
Not voting indirectly also is a vote for Trump.
no, it’s not
Yes, it is
if that were true, you could prove it. there is no world in which non votes are counted for Trump
In the actual world, governed by actual mathematics, you are incorrect. This has been repeatedly pointed out to you, with illustrative examples, by many people. Your stubborn, willful ignorance cannot change the fabric of reality.
indirectly
Say there are 9 voters. Four vote for Trump. Five heavily disagree with Trump (more than Trump’s four supporters). Three of them vote for Harris, two refuse to vote. Then these two people helped Trump since he’s winning now.
It works exactly the same on a much larger scale.
Not voting isn’t a protest either. Disrupting the voting? That would be a protest. But the Greens and Stein don’t have the balls for that.
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The genocidal lib fears the well informed Jill voter.
Hilarious. More like they don’t want to deal with the flood of nonsense from trolls, bots, and people that just turned 14.
trolls, bots, and people that just turned 14
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Jill Stein voters are throwing their votes away.
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Jill Stein voters don’t exist.
Which is it?
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Being informed means knowing Stein will not win the election. At least if Harris wins Ukraine can be saved.
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Kiss me.
I don’t get it. What’s that a reference to?
It was a bad paste, sorry. Changed my mind anyway and deleted
Jill for president. <3
They never have this energy for the millions of actual Trump voters.
Your ‘protest vote’ for Jill Stein is really a vote for Donald Trump
And it always has been.
Sometimes the Green Party protest vote is a vote for George H.W. Bush.
And George W. Bush.
And Donald Trump (the first time).
If the Green Party wasn’t a thing, there would be a lot of elections that the Republicans wouldn’t have won, because the margins were just that thin.
That’s assuming green party voters would vote for the dems, which probably isn’t the case. They’d be more likely to just not vote.
she ran during obama as well so it was also, technically, a vote for mccain
Well… That would depend on how many people vote for a third party, doesn’t it?
I mean, I know Americans love telling other Americans that voting third party is a wasted vote, but that’s a self-fulfilling profacy. If everyone believes nobody is voting third party, then nobody will vote third party, so third parties never win, which will lead Americans to say that nobody votes for third parties.
Your first past the post system and your major news agencies who don’t have the decency to pretend to be impartial is really doing a number on your country.
Our voting system fundamentally doesn’t allow for third parties to win the vote.
Even if we said “vote for a third party, there’s a statistically significant chance they might win!” this wouldn’t fix the issue, because Jill Stein doesn’t take votes from both sides equally.
Jill Stein leans left, which means people who are otherwise Democrat voters are going to be the largest demographic voting for her.
Our voting system is first past the post, which means this will actually decrease the chance of a left-leaning victory.
Let’s say Dems get 55% of the vote without Jill Stein, and Reps get 45%. Democrats win.
Then, we add in Jill Stein. A significant amount of voters switch over, even some Republicans. (which, in reality, would probably not at all, because Jill Stein’s policies are even further from their beliefs than even the Democrats are)
Dems get 35% of the vote. Reps get 40% of the vote. Jill Stein gets 25%. Democrats & Jill Stein lose, Republicans win.
If Jill Stein were entirely impartial, and took votes equally from each side, then we could have a vote like…
Dems get 45% of the vote. Reps get 35% of the vote. Jill Stein gets 20% of the vote. Democrats win in the same way they would have whether or not there was a third party.
The issue is that, obviously, Jill Stein isn’t taking equal parts of the vote, so this inevitably just reduces votes for Democrats, without reducing votes for Republicans.
It’s not an ideal system, (which is why we should advocate for Instant-Runoff or Rated voting) but it’s the option that will lead to the most left-leaning outcome, as opposed to a heavily fascist one.
It’s mathematically Impossible to have a 3rd party in the US, when are you people with other systems going to understand that?
It’s mathematically Impossible to have a 3rd party in the US
you’re making that up
You need 270 Electoral College votes to prevent the vote going to the states for the Presidency. There are 538 votes available. The only way to have more than two parties compete and have the election not go to the House is if one party is unified and has large public support against the other parties that do not. This essentially creates a single-party state.
Ergo, our system is designed to have two parties, each with roughly half the population behind them. Anything more mathematically ends in a single party state.
Then why do they never win any votes in the electoral college? When is the last time a third party ever succeeded nationally in the US when it didn’t involve the dissolution of some other party that preceded it?
So practically speaking, there is no anti-genocide vote. There is no health care for everyone vote. There is no reduction in firearm caused deaths of children and teens vote. There is no anti corporate regulatory capture vote. These things just are not possible to achieve in America by voting.
Yes. This is correct. Kudos to you for reaching the correct conclusion. It’s difficult to admit the system is fucked beyond repair; the fundamental shortcoming of Jill Stein voters. The only hope is to continue voting for the most progressive of the two candidates and pressure the winner to change the system (if that is even possible)
The thing about the “muh genocide!” crowd, is that if they gave that much of a shit about issues within their own country, maybe Americans could get some nice things once in a while, above and beyond the run of the mill bread and circuses.
There is a vote for MORE or LESS of all of the above. It’s not like your vote doesn’t matter. Do you want more genocide, or less genocide? “No genocide” isn’t an option. So do you want more genocide, or less genocide?
OK I want LESS.
I have been wanting less for a long time. Those things I want LESS of don’t seem to be reduced by much since I became eligible to vote. Voting’s not enough.
Which is which? Like, seriously. Put the recent headlines about Israel’s actions against the other guy’s vague, contradictory statements and demonstrated lack of deep interest in foreign affairs. It’s not clear at all.
Stein refused to call Putin a war criminal, so yes. There is no anti genocide vote.
Ahahaha spoken like a true Nazi watching Jews being boarded on a train.
Edit: I dont know what the hell is going on with this person. I am for damn sure not a nazi.
I dont like that voting third party in the US is essentially a non-vote for a party in the “system,” but it is. I voted green party in the past, and ended up regretting it. And relavent to Stein, not a good person, or even party, to vote for now. Folks need to be active, and vote down ballot, and in “off cycle” years. Change takes time, the best way to be heard is through the down ballot when helpful.
The current electoral system has myriad problems, and you’re absolutely right that focussing on local seats is a better path. I’m glad we’ve been seeing more comments like yours that do understand the stakes.
For people who rightly feel their interests aren’t adequately represented, rather than voting for spoilers or not voting at all, the best way to actually help fix these problems is to become an activist for electoral reform – starting now for 2028 and beyond. It usually feels like an afterthought brought up a month or two before the election, which is far too late.
Organisations like FairVote Action have been working to get alternative voting methods implemented in various states, and they’ve had some success.
If we want to escape this unfair and undemocratic voting system that’s shackled us to mediocrity and allowed fascism to gain a foothold, we have to keep thinking, educating, and acting now for the future. It’s doable if we work towards it.
It really does suck. The current voting system not only discourages anything other than a two party system, it basically guarantees it. And then it becomes one of those things where why the hell would one of those two parties, who’s perpetually in charge, ever vote to change a system that would allow for another party (or parties) to come into power? It’s just gonna be a slog to ever get it fully changed to something like ranked choice. But I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong.
many states have initiative systems. Alaska, for instance, implented a solid Ranked Choice Voting system for statewide elections. As we see from weed legalization: eventually ballot measures get soaked up by major parties.
Yeah…. She’s a disaster and always has been. Been saying this for years.
