The fundamental tenet of a working democracy is voting. Everyone should have a vote and everyone should exercise their right to vote. To that end we have been seeing posts attempting to shame/mock or otherwise influence people not to vote. While this is a meme community, the idea that people shouldn’t vote goes against the fundamentals of a democracy by the people and for the people. To that end, we are adding a new rule that disallows posts that discourage or shame people from voting. This doesn’t mean that you can’t address how people vote, but even those who don’t agree with you and your political views should still vote. We all should. Everyone. Part of the reason we are in the mess we are in now is because participation in democracy is abysmal. Posts discouraging people from voting are essentially propaganda and will be removed.

PoliticalMemes is a community for having fun at the expense of our political hellscape we find ourselves in. People not voting is a big part of why.

We are taking feedback on this change, please let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments and why.

  • Elle@lemmy.world
    82·
    9 months ago

    If voting is important to you, then it would serve the community better if the suggestion of not voting was discussed and denounced in the community itself.

    …It would be kind of interesting if the amount of people voting plummeted so much so that it removed almost any sense of considering the results legitimate and representative of the populace whatsoever. So far as I’m aware I don’t know of any democracies that have a sort of minimal threshold explicitly set to account for and address such a situation…They all seem to presume sufficient civic participation and confidence in their institutions that their citizens wouldn’t simply not participate/vote en masse.

    I think part of the reasoning for that being that if things have gotten that bad, surely the citizenry wouldn’t simply not vote, they’d actively be overthrowing the institutions they had lost confidence in.