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Planning to do voter fraud
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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None of which is actually true.
Not voting isn't supporting whatever candidate for the same reason piracy isn't stealing: The intersection of people who'd have bought it if they couldn't pirate is never everyone and there's a myriad factors involved. Piracy can be reduced by localised pricing and easier access, whereas hunting down pirates doesn't help. Same approach works in politics.
People aren't ideological dots on the plane of ideologies, with a probability distribution in a circle around that point. Politics as a whole can't be described by a set of coordinates. If you've got a large wheel that turns only in one direction, in the long run the torque you apply won't make a difference, you can't revert it.
More inportant than these two combined is that it's all perceptions. On the base level it's not a given that the 2nd place was truly closer to winning than the 3rd. It is in the case of the US president, but not on the smaller, more local scale. Nobody's vote is actually locked in and even the voters of the top 2 choices are rarely as inflexible as they're portrayed. The deeper issue of perception is that the media landscape determines how people think. As near as 4 years ago I wouldn't have goven much credit to this myself, but the treatment of Sanders and Corbyn show beyond doubt that sustained media campaigns still work wonders and that a lot of assumptions are just horseshit. Consider, Bernie Sanders is possibly the only presidential hopeful in the US who won the first 3 states and still wasn't made candidate. The media always talks about momentum, but momentum isn't a point boost from election results, it's coverage after the fact. Winning Nevada by a landslide means fuckall if the media that's nominally friendly can't shut up about how some old sellout is going to support your corpse of an opponent.
That's the rule of capital, a fact that's unprofitable need not be true, until it becomes profitable.
You're reintroducing complexity into my simplified example and making very valid points about external factors influencing decisions, but I'd like to hear your argument for how the Spoiler Effect isn't real.
The comparison with piracy falls flat because one is a personal entertainment with limited effect where inaction merely affect your ability to enjoy the game, the other is a political affair where even inaction can have consequences on others.
The spoiler effect is real in FPTP when voting for a third party instead of your preferred major party. When you include not voting in the model, you’re effectively including the option to not vote as an option on the hypothetical ballot. The problem with this is that it changes how votes are counted, making one of the “candidate”’s votes all count for nothing. It’s now a different system with different properties. So the spoiler effect for that candidate disappears unless you get into counting opportunity costs, but accounting for opportunity cost brings into the realm of just arguing against FPTP, which I agree with.
I think it’s worth mentioning that voting is fundamentally a last resort for when consensus building is too slow or won’t scale to the desired population. I think it’s also worth mentioning that liberal democracy is essentially democracy by and for the bourgeoisie, and was certainly not designed by people who had access to Arrow’s Theorem or anything of the sort. So the mathematical issues of which voting systems are good for which types of consensus are really separate from the social and economic issues of political shells and class war. And all in all, I think FPTP has done wonders for maintaining the two party system in the US, which itself has done wonders for maintaining bourgeois control.
Agreement in all points.
I found another way to sum up my point in the meantime: Not voting means that you let the rest decide, and effectively give your assent to their decision in advance. Spoiler voting may hurt your preferred major party. Hence, voting for that major party is the most reasonable choice within the boundaries of the election.
But outside of it, FPTP and the liberal bourgeoisie should just take a fucking hike.
I’ve always seen it the other way, that casting your vote is giving consent to follow the final decision. Personally, I live in a blue state, I work 2 jobs, I have a sizable family including extended family to take care of, and I don’t get enough time off to go wait for hours at my polling station. So I do mail in voting and leave most of the national races blank because my state also does winner-take-all. I still believe voting locally can help in harm reduction and facilitate organizing. I just don’t think it’s ever going to lead to revolution in the imperial core.
I’m reserving judgement on the working class mass movements happening in the periphery because their electoral components are genuinely backed by those mass movements. Maybe that’s naive of me given the US’s involvement in elections and coups in Latin America, for example, but I need some hope sometimes I guess. And also I’m from the US and don’t feel like I have a right to criticize those movements’ tactics.