this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Then we can use third party candidates to determine who the power actually goes to. At the end of the day. America is so bipolar split tlboth parties are now completely at the mercy of anyone who can garner 10% support. RFK Jr at this point can literally be the decider or who becomes president and who doesn't. Maybe we can use that as a tool of power to force the 2 parties to open the voting system up or have their power cockblocked from them every election cycle.
No, this is not how it works. Please look up the spoiler effect.
I can't vote because I don't live there, but am in the imperial core of countries, so it would be very nice to not have fascists in charge, considering we literally have prosecuted whistleblowers reporting on warcrimes at the behest of the US government. We're your little bitches whether we like it or not.
Y'all really do need to be hyper-focused on pushing for sweeping electoral reform, for sure.
In the meantime though, voting for a 3rd party under your system is basically a vote for the person you don't want.
Vote Biden if you would dislike having Trump more. If you don't want to do that, then yeah, you're basically admitting you're cool with the outcome of Trump presidency.
Please don't waste your vote, your vassals beg you.
I don't want Biden OR trump. that's why I'm voting for a so-called third party
Look up the spoiler effect. Please! This vassal is begging you.
The question under your system (please inform yourself about first-past-the-post) isn't who do you want to win, it's who you do you want NOT to win.
If you vote for your third-party candidate, it's equivalent to not having voted at all, if they have no chance of winning.
You're going to get Biden or Trump with how people vote (spoiler effect, look it up), one of those is going to win, make your peace with that.
So, which would you rather?
I am happy to spell out in greater detail why voting for a third party candidate is a waste of time under your system, happy to chat if there's still any confusion about it.
i have. it's not a natural phenomenon, it's a story that the media tells.
My friends, these are troll accounts. 8h old, only commented on this post.
calling me a troll doesn't change whether what I say is true
Please, do go on to explain how the spoiler effect is a myth. I'll wait. I'd like to see your logic on that one. (Inb4 you don't)
first, i think it will be helpful to recall what a myth is: it's a story we tell to explain the world around us. the spoiler effect is one of those stories: it explains, for some people, why clinton won in 1992. but analysis of the facts of that election find that, in fact, perot hurt clinton's margin of victory.
this myth is persistent, and reinforced by multiple media sources and even academics, but there is no way to actually produce a test of the theory of its existence or its mechanisms. so while you might like to tell this story, even if only to yourself, to justify voting for people who do bad things, to pretend that this myth is objective fact, that it is a natural law, is either misguided or dishonest, depending on whether you actually believe the myth.
wrong. the question is "who do i want to vote for" and i want to vote for the person i want to win. incidentally, i don't want to vote for someone i don't want to win.
this is election misinformation. my vote is still counted for the candidate, even if they don't win, just as trump votes were counted in 2020.
If you lived somewhere with a decent preferential voting system, you'd be right.
You don't though, and it's not misinformation to say that under a first part the post system, voting for a third candidate that is not going to win is a waste of the influence you have. CGPGrey explains it well
your YouTube video is based on duverger 's "law" which is not a natural law at all but a useless tautology
🤦♂️ It's a "law" in the mathematical/scientific sense. It is a model that explains something.
You're just spouting smart sounding words without actually proving anything.
Please, please, do explain how the spoiler effect is wrong.
Tell me how when you have first past the post and a two party system, voting for a third candidate who won't win isn't just making it more likely the candidate you'd like less to win.
Please, would love to hear you well reasoned and sound argument.
it's not a law. it's an empty tautology.
it argues that a certain type of election system tends to lead to a two-party system. however, from a critical perspective, this theory might be untestable. why? because someone could argue that any outcome can be explained by the theory. for instance, if there are more than two parties, it could be said that the system still favors two but this is just a temporary exception. this kind of reasoning makes it very difficult to disprove the theory, turning it more into a statement that's true by definition than an actual hypothesis based on evidence. similar arguments have been made about economic theories that rely on assuming everything else stays the same. to be more than just a statement, this theory would need a way to be tested with evidence and potentially proven wrong. that way, it could be a useful theory for understanding political systems instead of just an unfalsifiable claim.
The evidence is all of the first past the post systems that trend toward two dominant parties. There are 1000s of example elections, and the elections which don't conform to this are just as bad, because the winner will win with even FEWER votes than 50%. If you have 5 candidates and people are voting fairly evenly between them, you can win with just over 20% of the vote. I hope you can believe that, that's just the mathematical reality (that I'm really hoping we don't have to debate over, it's a fairly simple mathematical problem).
The myth is that what you have can actually provide voters with a meaningful choice. That's the media narrative, that first past the post is meaningful and gives the president a mandate because people voted for them, but it most certainly doesn't.
it seems that you are already trying to explain away exceptions rather than accepting that this myth lacks predictive power and may not, in fact, accurately explain any past elections at all.
Lets just focus on this particular election then.
Do you think anyone other than Biden or Trump will win? If you do, then your choice is clear, and as much as you question the existence of the spoiler effect (which is not being spread much by the media in the US, it's being spread by detractors of the current voting system), it doesn't really matter. People will vote towards those two candidates (hope we can agree that this is the likely outcome).
If that's the case, voting for a third candidate is as good as not voting because if your candidate doesn't win, and you COULD have voted for your next choice (why ranked voting is so much better, and it's the voting system letting you down), then the candidate you most don't want (assuming 3 candidates) has a better chance of winning (since you didn't vote for your second choice).
You say this isn't provable because it's about people's beliefs and it can't be tested, but sorry, elections are about human choices, beliefs are at play. I don't think it's a coincidence that democracies with ranked choice voting have more first preference votes to smaller parties, and that it's overwhelmingly so.
You can't really escape the fact that even if people just voted for their favourite candidate in first past the post, people would win with less than 50% of the vote (unless you're saying that the votes don't add up to 100% then I dunno what to say)
you're missing the crux of why it's not provable: there is no test for it. it's not that it's "about beliefs" is that you can't conduct an experiment to determine the validity
ask yourself: what test can we make that would disprove the theory?
maybe i'm just not smart enough to come up with one, but i can't conceive of one. an untestable, that is, an undisprovable hypothesis, is an empty tautology. or, at least modern epistemologists and critical rationalists have treated them this way.
maybe disprovability isn't a necessary facet of sound scientific theories. i tend to agree with popper, though.
Okay, the test would be that we have first past the post (single winner elections, like for president, or local electorates with single candidates elected, not proportional voting, which is better), produce elections with a spread of votes across many candidates, and don't consistently trend towards two.
This is definitely testable and disprovable, it's just that the outcome is overwhelmingly the case I have described, the spoiler effect leading to two dominant parties. There may be outliers and times where a third candidate does win, but these are the overwhelmingly rare exceptions.
we need to define terms like "consistently" and "trend". but even once you do that we still have the problem that you're already explaining away exceptions. this theory is not disprovable because there is no outcome that you would say actually disproves it. you would say we just need more data.
I'm not explaining away exceptions, they're called outliers. In any set of data there will be deviations. When I want to plot some viscosity data and get a few random points on my chart that don't line up with the rest of the curve, I'm still very confident that my curve is close to being accurate, as long as I have enough data points.
We have enough data points on first past the post elections.
For it to be disproven you would show first past the post elections don't have to two party systems in the vast majority of cases (which isn't the reality).
Now, you can try and handwave this away by saying, "oh but that's what people were TOLD TO BELIEVE, so you can't prove it". That's why we have not just the correlation to rely on, we have maths.
And you can't (I hope you don't) really disagree that you either have many candidates, who then win with less than a majority, or two parties, which then necessarily means the third smaller candidates can't win, and so people then vote for one of the larger parties so their vote counts. That's the binary state of affairs, there are no other options, the reality of maths doesn't allow for anything else, the votes add up to 100% ¯_(ツ)_/¯
being confident doesn't make a natural law.
this is a strawman. you're not dealing with what I actually said.
I'm not saying we need more data though, we have the data, plurality voting overwhelming results in two party systems. This is disprovable and I'm totally happy to change my mind based on the evidence and data.
I'm not straw-manning, you said before with regards to looking up the spoiler effect "I have. it's not a natural phenomenon, it's a story that the media tells."
Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying there.
in that context, the fact that the media says it and academics say it is a reason some people might believe it. i'm saying even if you do believe it, it's an undisprovable claim. it has little explanatory power, and ultimately, yes, is a myth.
i refuse to choose between them
Then Ms 8h account with their full name (deeeeefinitelty not a shill, deeeefinitelt a genuine user. Yeah people on Lemmy toooootally use their full name as if it were facebook), I'll just have to conclude you're trying to sway leftists not to vote for Biden, so the world ends up with trump.
I hope you're unsuccessful.
https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=Victoria+Antoinette+scharleau&ia=web
Okay 👍 Please do explain your whacky logic though. I came to the conclusion you're a troll because you're not really engaging by explaining your position beyond: "I don't wanna, it's a lie! The media is lying!!"
Go learn maths, go understand the mechanism behind the spoiler effect. Go look at the literal mountains of examples of it in play. Unless you think it's just some massive coincidence that every first-past-the-post system trends towards two parties.
I'm very keen and willing hear to any actual logic you bring to the table to justify your belief.
this condescension is really inappropriate.
Sorry, that's my bad. Your initial response was quite frustrating.
Emotions are high because this election affects people around the world, and hearing that you don't care enough to make a difference, is not very pleasant.
I apologise.
if the difference i made put biden in power, i would feel terrible. same for trump. so i will vote for someone i do want to have the office for 4 years.
Alrighty, then I suppose you just aren't voting. Which is your choice, just as long as you're clear on that.
Your candidate is not going to win, and I think you know that.
And if you think these choices are equally as bad, that's a whole different topic that let's not get in to.
they don't need to be equal for neither of them to be acceptable
For sure, I wouldn't like voting for either, also.
Just that if they're not equal, then that means you have a preference. And I hope you will act on that preference and make a difference, instead or just making yourself feel good that you've voted for the candidate you liked best.
You've been robbed of that choice by your voting system.
I would feel terrible if my vote helped put either of them in office, so I can't justify voting for either of them.
Well I suppose for voters like you, then yeah, go vote for your candidate. Just seems odd that you're saying you don't think their equally bad, but instead of then making a difference to ensure the less bad option wins, you'd rather make yourself feel good for voting for someone you like best.
May the gods have mercy on us mere vassals who are watching from the sidelines.
Stay safe in these troubled times friend, and thanks for engaging, even if at times it got a bit heated and apologies for offence caused.
you asked for the same explanation in three separate comments in succession. perhaps you could wait until you get teh explanation before badgering me.
Yeah we have many separate threads now. Apologies for this.
i don't mind having many threads. it's at least partially my doing. but having redundant conversations across them seems like a giant waste.
your insinuations and suppositions don't change the truth of what I've said
As an outsider it's really annoying when someone just doesn't understand the reality they find themselves in.
A third party isn't in the cards, it never is, but it especially isn't right now. The only way to get a third party elected is to change your voting system, but that's a process that takes years, decades even. It's really not as easy as wasting a vote with a third party, it takes a lot more effort. And the only way to start or continue that process right now is to vote Biden because if Trump wins you might not even get another election to vote in.
And Trump has a good chance of winning because the republicans aren't having such discussions. They know what to do, and come election day they'll all march in and do their job, like they do every time. Remember that he only won last time because people like you felt icky about voting for Clinton.
If you allow me a moment of catharsis, I'll just add that if you Americans once again subject the world to more Trump insanity, I really hope you get to feel the worst of it.
he won because people voted for him. I voted against him, and I'm going to again. and I'm voting against biden just like the last time. you're characterization is patronizing and dismissive of real concerns.
why the fuck would you wish that on anyone?