The People that anger me the most: The "Independents" who voted for neither

[Der_Trihs]

@Procacious

The main point of disagreement between me and the theme of this thread is how important it is to vote for the lesser of two evils when you know for certain that your vote will not impact the results. To go back to the ice cream example, I can see the other hands in the air. 20 people are voting for vanilla and 15 for chocolate. I can vote for chocolate because I like it better, but chocolate will still lose. And since I really prefer strawberry, I want everyone to know that I would prefer strawberry to be one of the choices next time.

That argument breaks down because it’s more like the flavor likely to win is “sewage”, and that if it wins no other flavor will ever again be allowed to win.

[Procacious]

@velomont

Except that, in the case of an election, you don’t see the hands in the air. So you honestly have no accurate idea of the aggregate voter preferences. You may have a good guess, based on whatever analytics are out there, but there could be some unseen trend in the works.

So, IMHO, it’s critical for each voter to assume that their vote could be a deciding vote.

Trump wasn’t going to win California in any scenario and if they can convince people to vote for the lesser of two evils even when their vote doesn’t matter they can successfully ensure that they never need to put forth a candidate anyone wants. Progressives will endlessly vote for conservative Democrats that will never do anything progressive and Christian extremists will vote for someone like Trump that is nothing they would want.

I understand the desire to convince people to disenfranchise themselves by telling them they must vote for someone they don’t want in election after election, so you never have to give them what they want, but not everyone is going to fall for it.

[Der_Trihs]

@Procacious

I understand the desire to convince people to disenfranchise themselves by telling them they must vote for someone they don’t want in election after election, so you never have to give them what they want, but not everyone is going to fall for it.

So instead they should vote to disenfranchise themselves, period?