I ended up casting my vote for Harris. It’s not that I don’t think it would be okay for me to vote for Stein, New York’s electoral votes are going to Harris unless she’s doing a national noseplant. It’s not specifically that the Green Party isn’t pragmatic on the need for them to stand down. What’s closer is my frustration that the Green Party isn’t pragmatic on any goddam thing, and I’m not talking about compromising one’s principles I’m talking about stepping up to run stuff, be governmental, you can’t do that without working with people. Instead, we’ve got purists who really love forming circular firing squads.
What’s the point of participating in a grass-roots tiny political party if there’s no room for your opinions and perspectives? And the purists carry an attitude that political correctness can be spelled out and weild it like Hey, all the relevant and important people discussed this and decided how it is, so by definition you’re wrong if you disagree, so you have to apologize but it won’t be enough if you do".
Ultimately I voted for Kamala Harris because I’m hoping she wins and if she does I want to feel like I participated putting her there. I had that feeling about Hillary Clinton, too. I wasn’t looking for perfect, just the pragmatic that aspires to do well at it.
And while I have no bad feelings about Jill Stein, and I hope she does well too, I wasn’t able to get that enthused about her candidacy. I’m not a Green because of their positions on the issues they’re known best for, although I think most of that stuff is good, but in particular because they have a commitment to democratic inclusive egalitarian process, the method of doing politics, and that’s my pet issue.
Glad to learn of someone else here whose pet issue is the methods of how we do elections. I believe that election reforms - and I don’t mean piddly bullshit like voter ID arguments - are desperately needed to improve our democracy and I’ve been a little dismayed to read posts on this board objecting to changes to our godawful closed primaries, first past the post practices.
Perhaps after the immediate craziness subsides, we can start a thread discusses improvements necessary to upgrading our representation.
The problem with third parties in the US is the two party system means they don’t really matter politically except as as spoilers. So they end up full of people who don’t care about practicality and just want to posture/argue, egotists who want to be big fish in a small pond, or people willing to outright sabotage their nominal side of the political spectrum for one reason or another.
At least some systems of ranked-choice voting, like instant-runoff voting allow a voter to choose a would-be spoiler candidate as their first choice, followed by a major party candidate as their second choice. If their first choice does not win a majority (which is likely to be the case if they are a minor party candidate), then their choice switches to their second choice candidate, and so on until a candidate reaches a majority.
Yeah. The issue is that for obvious reasons neither of the two major parties wants to do anything that changes the system to make third parties more relevant. It’s not an unsolvable problem, just one that the people in charge have no desire to fix.
The problem is that our entire federal government was structured in the belief that there would be no such thing as partisanship; which in hindsight is only a little less naïve than believing that we could elect a benevolent dictator who out of patriotism and devotion to duty would never, ever abuse their authority.
Ranked choice voting is far from being the default method of selecting election winners, but it has gradually become more widespread. The D/R duopoly are not in favor of it because it would give voters “permission” to rank candidates from the little parties as their first choice and the mainstream-party candidate as their second, hence neither “throwing their vote away” nor “de facto voting to support [candidate at the other side of the conventional political spectrum]”.
In any given state, the Democratic Party would benefit if people who currently vote Green or Socialist or other lefty 3rd-party had ranked choice voting available to them, since a high percent of such voters would tend to designate the Democratic candidate as their 2nd or 3rd choice; and similarly the Republican Party would benefit if Libertarians and other right-inclined 3rd-party voters could put the Republican candidate down as their 2nd-or-whatever’th choice. But both parties worry that such a system would gradually let the alternative parties gain traction.
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people.
For over forty years now, I have subscribed to Ballot Access News, the reporting arm of COFOE (Coalition for Free and Open Elections), a coalition of small parties bringing lawsuits about equal ballot access. Those who do not have to endure it cannot imagine the roadblocks both the Republicans and Democrats put up to keep their candidates off of the ballot or work to allow them if they perceive it will hurt the other side.