this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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No, it means we'll vote for someone else.
That's the same as not voting.
How dumb are you? It's not the same. Two completely different actions.
No sweetheart, America uses first past the post voting. Voting third party is straight up just throwing your ballot on the trash.
Then everyone should be voting third party. This 2 party system is going to lead to a complete shutdown of our ability to govern and it has already made the US into a phony democracy. Peoples willingness to participate in it and just accept it is why the country has gone to shit. Because most of the people in the US can't think outside their narrow worldview of bipolar red vs blue tribalism.
Yes, in a perfect world everyone would vote 3rd party.
But this is reality, and the only viable choices are Trump and Biden.
The system is designed to enforce a two party system. If you and people who agree with you start to vote third party then the party you disagree with the MOST gets an advantage. It's called the spoiler effect.
In order to get rid of the two part system you have to get rid of first past the post voting.
This video explains the whole thing pretty well.
Yes, first-past-the-post voting results in a two-party system; however, it doesn't dictate which two parties are in power. Dominant parties have dropped out of favor in the past and been replaced with a new two-party pairing. Its been a while since the Whig party was an option.
duverger's "law" is, in fact, not a law at all. it's a useless tautology.
We are talking about reality vs the ideal.
The ideal would be what you say, having more than 2 options.
The reality is we do not have that system. We have exactly 2 choices because of our voting laws and system.
If you want to talk about voting 3rd party let's first get the system changed so that even works. I want it too, but blindly ignoring how FPTP voting and the electoral college works so you can feel better isn't helping anything.
Put another way. We have a trolley problem. We have 2 tracks and both will cause some harm, but one does WAY more than the other. But you are saying you won't even acknowledge there is a lever because you would rather be off down a nice grassy trail to a beautiful town on the lakeside. Yeah, that's great, I would too, but the tracks don't go there yet. We have to build the rail to get there first. And arguing about it doesn't change the reality we are stuck in.
Different actions, same outcome. The US system effectively turns voting into 2 party voting. 3rd party vote is the essentially the same as not voting because your vote won't count for anything.
Let's say in your state Biden gets 200 votes, Trump gets 199 votes. You, for the sake of the argument, get 2 votes. Let's say you vote third party. What's the outcome? Biden wins. But what if you don't vote at all? Biden still wins. If you give both votes to Trump then Trump wins.
Now you may argue that if you vote third party then maybe you could instead swing the vote for third party. That is insanely unlikely, but let's say that happens and your state ends up voting third party. That is still, let's say 10, points to third party while all the other states split their votes between Biden and Trump. So that's 10 points to 3rd party, 200+ to Biden and Trump. All you can achieve is to take away points from either candidate and that may swing the election towards one of two candidates, but your candidate will not win anyway.
In short, voting third party does nothing. Best you can hope for is to disrupt the existing voting process but that's is pretty unlikely. You might as well not even vote.