I always vote, but in defence of non-voters, why is not voting not a valid option when both choices are unacceptable to you? If someone offers you arsenic and cyanide, surely you’re justified in protesting about being forced to accept arsenic, despite not making a ‘choice’.
I’m happy to defend non-voters, because a single non-voter doesn’t affect outcomes. However, your argument fails when there is more than one election on the ballot, as is usually the case. Perhaps you don’t like either choice for governor, but maybe you have an informed opinion about your state representative. It’s okay to leave the governor blank!
I always leave parts of the ballot blank, because I’m too lazy and indifferent to make informed choices about meaningless positions such as university regents, or because all three judges on the ballot are already incumbents.
I would argue that because such a large percentage of Americans don’t participate in our elections, we get the choices we do. If a higher percentage of Americans actively participated in elections it would fundamentally change the kind of candidates we get.
There’s a third choice: vote blank. That makes it clear that it wasn’t a matter of “I couldn’t be arsed”, but one of “you both can kiss my ass”.
If I were to not vote for either, that is exactly what I would do. And thus ends my defence of non-voters. I suppose if you’re not even prepared to voice your disastification with the candidates/the process using the same process that gives you the voice then yes, it’s just pure laziness.
Australia has mandatory voting, but you’re absolutely free to go in, spoil your ballot and go home. I also think that we should do everything we can to make voting easy like make it a national holiday, free mass transportation, etc.
We don’t need your permission to state the obvious.
I have serious doubts whether the data on “Turned in blank paper” is interpreted as “we don’t like the two party system”. (Or whatever you think it says.)
Clever technique there - when I used it. But I can’t rebut someone who says nothing. You guys are disappointing as adversaries.
Trolololol!!
Exactly. It’s posts like this that make me wish we had a “like” button.
My wife and I are big believers in the importance of voting, and have tried to instill the importance of voting in our college-aged son.
I have not missed a presidential election since I turned 18, and for many of those years I had to register and vote absentee, as I was in the military and a legally a Texas resident. For a time, Texas used punch card ballots (the ones with the “hanging chads”), but if you voted absentee, you only got the card (with a bunch of printed letters and numbers marking out the rows and columns), but no ballot marking device, like the Votomatic. You had to look up each candidate and figure out which chad to punch out. Once you got that far, you had to figure out how to punch the card. They recommended using a paper clip and putting it on a short-pile carpet. Then you had to mail it back. It was a real pain in the neck.
(Aside: When I left the military and started voting locally in Connecticut, they still had the old-fashioned lever machines. In the mid-2000s they switched to optical scan paper ballots.)
Anyway, I haven’t missed any election since I moved to Connecticut, including midterms, primaries, local elections and budget votes. Voters have to approve the town budget every year, and the decision sometimes comes down to a handful of votes that determines whether the budget passes or fails.
My son is now about 45 minutes away up at the University of Connecticut. Since he started there, he’s requested absentee ballots for just about every election, which get mailed to our house. We bring the ballot up to him to fill out and seal in an envelope. By making the 1-1/2 hour round-trip drive every election, we hope we are impressing upon him how important it is to vote.
On the other hand, my son has a roommate who is majoring in Political Science, has aspirations for a career in politics, and who actually had an unpaid internship last summer working for the Connecticut Democratic Party…but who neglected to vote last week. :smack: The roommate said he had a Poli Sci professor who told his class that he hadn’t voted in decades, and that voting was a waste of time because both of the major parties were basically the same. :smack::smack::smack:
Kantian ethics is not the be-all-end-all, but it does have a point. We are not just individuals, but also a collective of people. We do have to consider the effect if everyone in a similar situation to us did the same thing we choose to do. Any argument that is good enough for us would be good enough for them.
I fucking knew my vote was unlikely to count. I’m in a red district in a predominantly red state. I knew that voter ID would pass, even though it shouldn’t. But I voted anyways, because the alternative is that no one who is blue in a red state/district would vote, and that means no chance of either ever flipping.
Democracy only works if we don’t convince ourselves that our votes don’t matter. Because that is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
My understanding is that it is a nominal fine that you can get out of by writing a letter explaining your absence. I like that, it requires some level of work on the voter’s part to not vote, so might as well vote.
I don’t know about the calls for a national holiday. When I worked entry level jobs, I worked almost every single holiday. Only now that I own my own place, and have declared election day to be an observed holiday, do I get it off (along with all my employees.) I would be concerned that making it a national holiday in that fashion would only make it harder for low wage employees to make it.
Personally, I’d like to see an extension of early voting, both in time and in space. Have early voting at post offices, at schools, at libraries, not just at the county board of elections.
What it says is that there is an undervote for that office. I never vote on people running unopposed, as I want someone to see that there are people who do not bother to fill in the bubble for that guy. When people see that there are votes that are not going to any of the candidates, that creates a vacuum that they can attempt to hang their hat on.
Voting is my only voice in government, and I mean to make the most of it.
Surely no harder than it is now.
In Spain it is. Then again, this was brought up in part by radical groups claiming that abstention was a vote for them: people who liked those guys even less than they liked the politicians up and voted blank as a reaction. Australia doesn’t have such a history and according to the Aussies in this thread they do interpret blank votes as “didn’t like any of the options”.
A lot of the people in this thread are not American, we can’t interpret blank votes as “I don’t like the two party system” just on account of not having such shit.
Nava: Are write-in votes permitted in your country’s elections?
I don’t know what the hell is the matter with you people. I’m familiar, at least a little bit, with the biographies of most of the people in this thread, and to my knowledge, not a one of you has ever served in the military. How can you claim to be allowed to “bitch” when you haven’t even fulfilled your civic duty of serving in the armed forces?
I, and only I, have the right to bitch about my country because I have a service medal and you do not.* So STFU with your “I voted, I can bitch” bullshit. Everyone knows you only earn that patriotic right by actually, y’know, serving the country itself in a time of war.
Again I say, what the hell is wrong with you people?
Isn’t it funny how people who are sooooo jazzed up to vote are the same people who care about polls of n=950? Somehow we can ask a handful of people what the whole state thinks, for months or years before an election, but then on election day, everyone’s got to show up or it doesn’t count.
*according to rules I just made up without any authority to do so whatsoever. But if you really wanna see whose dick is more red, white, and blue, I’ll play that game.
“I’m Bob Heinlein, and I approve this message.”
You, um…you might want to see a doctor about that.
I’m not even sure that it really requires a commitment to Kantian ethics. Democracy is necessarily a collective process, the strength of which relies on a collective commitment to participate. I’ve never bought into the “right to bitch” or “not having the right to bitch” line of argument to support the need for participation in democracy. Whether they vote or not, people have the right to bitch because we’re people and we can bitch if we want, free will and all. But to put it a different perspective, participation in democracy (assuming it’s a healthy one) can safeguard your right to bitch without suffering consequences.