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[Cathar]

You say that you should be in charge, but you don't take charge. Silent protest tends to result in nobody hearing you.
At least casting an empty ballot shows that you care enough to show up.

Well, that's the point : I don't care. The message to politicians is ; make me care or lose the elections. Ball's in your camp.

[Egan_BW]

Why would they "make you care"? Easier to just do without you entirely. You have no power if you show yourself unwilling to use that power.

[smjjames]

Voting empty ballots really only works when you actually acknowledge the empty ballots as existing as I noticed for Brazil. In the US, they either don’t count them or put them in some catch-all category for invalid ballots that happen for a variety of reasons.

Edit: Or like in Broward County, count them as undervotes or overvotes. There’s really no clear way of getting the message through by blank voting the way the US does it.

[Cathar]

That is true, alone I have almost no power, but I realize my voice constitute a fragment of the popular voice of my country. I am simply a manifestation of a deeper mass movement who simply doesn't care about the two traditional players in the political game after they both failed one after another.

You can do without me, sure. But by doing without me you are also doing without everyone else who share the sentiment. If you (as a politician) think the sentiment is superficial and just affect me, the individual, sure, do without me. Do not adress my issues. Keep playing the traditional ball game. But if you miscalculate your shot and a significant portion of your voter base stays home on D-day it's on you.

I mean I say that in general terms. "I" am just your individual voter. I don't call the shots in a representative democracy but I have every right to react to the shots how I see fit, by voting for X, Y, or no one. I mean that's the rules of the game. I have nothing to prove to anyone, but politicians do.

[Starver]

(Multi-ninjaed. I'm sure you can work out where this thought fits. And if you're wrong you've probably found a better place for it anyway.)

I heard people say, at the end of her run* that Thatcher was definitely left-wing from a median transPondian perspective.

(Obviously I was hearing this from Internet-accessing people, well before it became an everyman utility and so was probably an educated (i.e. 'Liberal') person trying to make a point about how much right-wing everyone else was than than their 'centrist' POV. What's ironic is that though I think they were maybe trying hyperbole, I also recall that a specific subset of some of their opinions were, from my perspective, a slight shuffle to the right of Temüjin. But they were a 'Merkin, so go figure!)


Oh, and those who didn't vote for Hillary, this time just gone, are half as culpable as those who did vote for Trump. If you saw no difference between the two (at the time) then you can be happy, but if you were "Never Her, but absolutely Never Trump", or similar, then you really didn't come out of that smelling of roses. It was going to be one or the other, and it wasn't going to be so obviously one or the other** that you could afford to protest with your vote or lack of it.

Analysing where 3rd-party/stay-at-home-blips might have changed things was, I remember, an interesting post-mortem read on the whole thing.

* When she'd done all the damage she was going to do, Reagan had handed over to Bush and there were signs of collapse of the Warsaw Pact, give or take my actually accuracy about assigning the timestamp of this recollection.
** Estimates like 90% chance of winning wasn't "gets 90% of the vote, comfortably", just that in the close-fought contest the guess on all the falling dice heavily favoured a close win by that random jiggle rather than the combination of dice-rolls that jiggled the other way.

[WealthyRadish]

Quote Snip for president

Rolan, Bernie ain't a socialist. Seriously. In countries where a left exists instead of "right" and "right on steroids", he'd be labelled as... a right-winger.

Yep, sometimes we (as in Americans) forget that the American political center is right shifted (or should I say, red-shifted, heh) from where the center is in some places around the world and our progressives would actually be considered somewhat moderate. Not even sure what a heavy left winger in Europe would look like for us since the Republicans already make the more progressive politicians look extreme. Other than maybe ‘COMMUNISM!COMMUNISM!COMMUNISM!’ 

My impression is that what might be considered the "far-left" in Europe (the "left-most" parties still capable of winning seats) couldn't generally be considered socialist more than the center-left of Europe. The main distinction there between left and far-left seems to come down to intensity of concern for social issues, the environment, resistance to neoliberal erosions, and sometimes euroskepticism. Center-left parties in Europe often have "socialist" in their name and historical origins as Marxist parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but have long since abandoned any intention whatsoever to move toward something other than capitalism. These parties are today essentially progressive liberals, but ones who have advanced much further in achieving their historical goals than the "left" in the US, while the parties to their left are often the successors to communist parties that underwent a similar transformation, particularly after the fall of the USSR.

[smjjames]

An of course, during the Cold War, the left got suppressed to an extent due to the ideological conflict. Now that the pressure is off, a new generation that didn’t experience that suppression fame of age and are basically filling in that void which would otherwise be filled.

Speaking of Cold War, I’ve seen articles saying that a new Cold War with China could be starting, but it seems more like the old competition between Great Powers than anything resembling the Cold War of the 20th which was purely ideological.

Yes, the Chinese are still ruled by a communist party, but nobody is going around screaming about the dangers of communism and how we need to combat it. The fact that they are communist appears completely irrelevant to this one.

[Criptfeind]

That is true, alone I have almost no power, but I realize my voice constitute a fragment of the popular voice of my country. I am simply a manifestation of a deeper mass movement who simply doesn't care about the two traditional players in the political game after they both failed one after another.

You can do without me, sure. But by doing without me you are also doing without everyone else who share the sentiment. If you (as a politician) think the sentiment is superficial and just affect me, the individual, sure, do without me. Do not adress my issues. Keep playing the traditional ball game. But if you miscalculate your shot and a significant portion of your voter base stays home on D-day it's on you.

I mean I say that in general terms. "I" am just your individual voter. I don't call the shots in a representative democracy but I have every right to react to the shots how I see fit, by voting for X, Y, or no one. I mean that's the rules of the game. I have nothing to prove to anyone, but politicians do.

The issue with this is although you want people to cater to you but without interaction from you they have no idea what you want. How can a politician possibly address your issues if they have no idea you exist?

People not voting doesn't make the politicians move towards the unknown vague mass of "what the non voters want" it just makes them concentrate more on the desires of the people that actually voted. It seems like you feel wronged and don't want to support people who don't perfectly align with you, but the system isn't going to just randomly drift towards what you want, you need to actually try to support the people that align most closely with your interests. Like, frankly, your philosophy towards politics doesn't seem like it'll actual help you get what you want, no matter how much smug satisfaction you can get from saying it and proudly declaring yourself a non voter, it's not worth the complete loss of any political power.

[Cathar]

The issue with this is although you want people to cater to you but without interaction from you they have no idea what you want. How can a politician possibly address your issues if they have no idea you exist?

Politicians have ways, a lot of them, to know what people want. Polls, consumer unions, local representatives, just to name three that comes to my mind directly. Pressing issues do generate ad hoc activism onto themselves. Franckly I believe the popular voice is heard loud and clear for anyone who'd listen.

People not voting doesn't make the politicians move towards the unknown vague mass of "what the non voters want" it just makes them concentrate more on the desires of the people that actually voted.

And so they'll have to lose more elections. They have to cater to people, even to people who do not vote. This is their litteral job. Or else, they will fail and the failure is on them. (Edit : And just to be clear ; european politicians understand that. US citizen understand that. The only ones who didn't read the memo are US representatives)

I mean I'm saying absolutely nothing controversial here, I'm just describing the political process in a representative democracy. (Edit : And I might sound smug in the process, mostly because I do insist that in a democracy, I am, as a part of the demos, a part of the kratos. The collective voice is royalty and should be treated as such by the people who are its servents)

The vote represents my power, my share in the process making of the destiny of my country. People who want it will not bully me out of it.

[WealthyRadish]

That is true, alone I have almost no power, but I realize my voice constitute a fragment of the popular voice of my country. I am simply a manifestation of a deeper mass movement who simply doesn't care about the two traditional players in the political game after they both failed one after another.

You can do without me, sure. But by doing without me you are also doing without everyone else who share the sentiment. If you (as a politician) think the sentiment is superficial and just affect me, the individual, sure, do without me. Do not adress my issues. Keep playing the traditional ball game. But if you miscalculate your shot and a significant portion of your voter base stays home on D-day it's on you.

I mean I say that in general terms. "I" am just your individual voter. I don't call the shots in a representative democracy but I have every right to react to the shots how I see fit, by voting for X, Y, or no one. I mean that's the rules of the game. I have nothing to prove to anyone, but politicians do.

The issue with this is although you want people to cater to you but without interaction from you they have no idea what you want. How can a politician possibly address your issues if they have no idea you exist?

People not voting doesn't make the politicians move towards the unknown vague mass of "what the non voters want" it just makes them concentrate more on the desires of the people that actually voted. It seems like you feel wronged and don't want to support people who don't perfectly align with you, but the system isn't going to just randomly drift towards what you want, you need to actually try to support the people that align most closely with your interests. Like, frankly, your philosophy towards politics doesn't seem like it'll actual help you get what you want, no matter how much smug satisfaction you can get from saying it and proudly declaring yourself a non voter, it's not worth the complete loss of any political power.

This labeling of the non-voting slacker as irrelevant is reasonable but also isn't a particularly important distinction, since the difference in impact between between voting and not voting is usually zero anyway.

This specific point here about parties needing feedback through votes came up earlier in the thread, and seems to apply just as well if put on its head. If you want the party to change but vote for them anyway because the alternative is worse, how should they interpret that except as a green light to stay the same and continue taking your vote for granted? This is in fact exactly how FPTP elections work in practice, with the majority of the country being either written off completely as not worth caring about or assumed to be a loyal bloc that'll swallow almost anyone. The only voters that matter under this system are the apathetic non-voters that could be motivated to turn out under the right conditions and the tiny minority of swing voters that happen to live in an arbitrary area where upsets are still possible. Effectively, the rest are just a rubber stamp for whatever slob could hack it in the primary little leagues.

Really, the primaries are the more likely place where voting can matter (if a primary is even held), but it also means that people who want to have a political impact should really be thinking about other means outside of voting, rather than assuming that the system is working and that voting itself is an appreciable step up from not voting.

[Trekkin]

The collective voice is royalty and should be treated as such by the people who are its servents)

The vote represents my power, my share in the process making of the destiny of my country. People who want it will not bully me out of it.

And so it is. The collective silence, on the other hand, is not, largely because it's totally unintelligible. Your refusal to vote because nobody matches your positions is indistinguishable from everyone else's refusal to vote for whatever reason, however insane, and treated as a bloc they're not really worth the return on investment. Remember how our system works: you don't need 50% of the population, just 50% of the electorate, and the system naturally reaches an equilibrium with 100%/(requisite vote share) parties so it's very difficult for both to lose. Not voting isn't voting against anyone in any electorally meaningful way.

Now, the better-known impact of this is that it's twice as effective to convert existing voters from other parties as it is to enlarge the electorate, but it also means that the marginal impact of get-out-the-vote efforts goes down as you do more of them. It's generally worth seeing to it that already engaged people are registered to vote and can physically get to the polls or otherwise go through the procedure for voting, sure. It's less worth it to try to convince people to participate at all when there are still people who want to vote and cannot, and at some point it's less effective to find them than it is to go after swing voters. This is partly because, while opinion polls and so forth tell the politicians how the people writ large feel about certain issues in isolation, the most reliable indicator of their overall political inclinations is the vote itself, so if you're refusing to participate then no one party has any reason to think you're worth going after because you might vote for the other party after all. The folks reaching out of their own accord, on the other hand, have every bit as much of a vote as you do and are much simpler to get to vote.

Nobody needs or wants to bully you out of your vote, Cathar; the lesson you're actually teaching them by not voting is not "you need to pay attention to me" but rather "at least one of you can and will win while ignoring me." Ignoring you is, after all, free, and if it costs them nothing that's a net savings in effort.

Incidentally, when you find yourself claiming that professionals are unaware of the self-evident basics of their profession and therefore feel the need to reiterate them at length, it is time to step back and re-evaluate your own understanding rather than automatically ascribing their actions to staggering ignorance. Experts do things that are counterintuitive to amateurs for reasons.

[smjjames]

An of course, during the Cold War, the left got suppressed to an extent due to the ideological conflict. Now that the pressure is off, a new generation that didn’t experience that suppression fame of age and are basically filling in that void which would otherwise be filled.

Speaking of Cold War, I’ve seen articles saying that a new Cold War with China could be starting, but it seems more like the old competition between Great Powers than anything resembling the Cold War of the 20th which was purely ideological.

Yes, the Chinese are still ruled by a communist party, but nobody is going around screaming about the dangers of communism and how we need to combat it. The fact that they are communist appears completely irrelevant to this one.

Chinese economy is looking to be on shaky ground; the current US-Chinese trade war isn't helping matters. Of course, tanking the Chinese economy also screws over a lot of Chinese foreign investment into various industries across the Pacific, from housing (Canada, Australia) to tech (US).

Also notice how that market "correction" turned out to be an actual downturn? Sure, that isn't indicative of much, but given the specific sector of relevance (tech) that had the downturn, that indicates to me a hesitation on part of Chinese investors looking to spend money abroad. Maybe not recession-imminent, but a slowdown seems pretty sure, and that slowdown will likely be driven by China (with Trump's tariffs only accelerating matters). Given how much money it currently throws around (Belt and Road Initiative) and how Xi Jinpeng's power is built entirely around the crux of a strong Chinese economy, a slowdown could quite likely turn into a freefall.

A "Cold War" with China requires that China can maintain its current position for a prolonged period of time. That is by no means a given.

Plus, the Cold War is simply the only Great Power style competition beteeen powers that is still in living memory, so, it gets used as comparison as we don’t really have anything else in living memory to compare to.

Besides, saying Cold War II just sounds cooler than ‘Great Power competition’.

[wierd]

The collective voice is royalty and should be treated as such by the people who are its servents)

The vote represents my power, my share in the process making of the destiny of my country. People who want it will not bully me out of it.

And so it is. The collective silence, on the other hand, is not, largely because it's totally unintelligible. Your refusal to vote because nobody matches your positions is indistinguishable from everyone else's refusal to vote for whatever reason, however insane, and treated as a bloc they're not really worth the return on investment. Remember how our system works: you don't need 50% of the population, just 50% of the electorate, and the system naturally reaches an equilibrium with 100%/(requisite vote share) parties so it's very difficult for both to lose. Not voting isn't voting against anyone in any electorally meaningful way.

Now, the better-known impact of this is that it's twice as effective to convert existing voters from other parties as it is to enlarge the electorate, but it also means that the marginal impact of get-out-the-vote efforts goes down as you do more of them. It's generally worth seeing to it that already engaged people are registered to vote and can physically get to the polls or otherwise go through the procedure for voting, sure. It's less worth it to try to convince people to participate at all when there are still people who want to vote and cannot, and at some point it's less effective to find them than it is to go after swing voters. This is partly because, while opinion polls and so forth tell the politicians how the people writ large feel about certain issues in isolation, the most reliable indicator of their overall political inclinations is the vote itself, so if you're refusing to participate then no one party has any reason to think you're worth going after because you might vote for the other party after all. The folks reaching out of their own accord, on the other hand, have every bit as much of a vote as you do and are much simpler to get to vote.

Nobody needs or wants to bully you out of your vote, Cathar; the lesson you're actually teaching them by not voting is not "you need to pay attention to me" but rather "at least one of you can and will win while ignoring me." Ignoring you is, after all, free, and if it costs them nothing that's a net savings in effort.

Incidentally, when you find yourself claiming that professionals are unaware of the self-evident basics of their profession and therefore feel the need to reiterate them at length, it is time to step back and re-evaluate your own understanding rather than automatically ascribing their actions to staggering ignorance. Experts do things that are counterintuitive to amateurs for reasons.

I would like to see an option for "Abstention, with notation"

That solves the problem.  The collective silence, stops being silence.  It becomes a screaming bag of cats instead, but at least some useful data could be collected.   

"I abstain, because----" is very open ended, but gives the political engine the information on why you abstained from selecting any candidate, despite showing up at the polling center.

[Trekkin]

I would like to see an option for "Abstention, with notation"

That solves the problem.  The collective silence, stops being silence.  It becomes a screaming bag of cats instead, but at least some useful data could be collected.   

"I abstain, because----" is very open ended, but gives the political engine the information on why you abstained from selecting any candidate, despite showing up at the polling center.

While I'd like that option too, you can kind of indicate that now with some exit polls. That still requires you to go through the motions, though.

This specific point here about parties needing feedback through votes came up earlier in the thread, and seems to apply just as well if put on its head. If you want the party to change but vote for them anyway because the alternative is worse, how should they interpret that except as a green light to stay the same and continue taking your vote for granted?

By examining other polling data. The vote isn't ever considered in isolation; it's used to contextualize all the other polls and see, in the simplest case, what level of professed voter enthusiasm correlates with what voter turnout. Even comparing primary and general election results can tell you something about the prevalence of negative voting, and particularly with the recent general election the conventional wisdom is shifting to advise more effort be spent on retaining votes. That also matters because predicted turnout, which is informed primarily by past turnout, informs strategy decisions about where it's best to allocate resources -- which can include policy, albeit holistically.

Not voting is much harder to read than negative voting, so it's a concomitantly less effective form of expression. Maybe someone was disgusted with all available candidates or maybe they just forgot what day Election Day was; it all goes into the same bin.

[wierd]

I would like to see an option for "Abstention, with notation"

That solves the problem.  The collective silence, stops being silence.  It becomes a screaming bag of cats instead, but at least some useful data could be collected.   

"I abstain, because----" is very open ended, but gives the political engine the information on why you abstained from selecting any candidate, despite showing up at the polling center.

While I'd like that option too, you can kind of indicate that now with some exit polls. That still requires you to go through the motions, though.

This specific point here about parties needing feedback through votes came up earlier in the thread, and seems to apply just as well if put on its head. If you want the party to change but vote for them anyway because the alternative is worse, how should they interpret that except as a green light to stay the same and continue taking your vote for granted?

By examining other polling data. The vote isn't ever considered in isolation; it's used to contextualize all the other polls and see, in the simplest case, what level of professed voter enthusiasm correlates with what voter turnout. Even comparing primary and general election results can tell you something about the prevalence of negative voting, and particularly with the recent general election the conventional wisdom is shifting to advise more effort be spent on retaining votes. That also matters because predicted turnout, which is informed primarily by past turnout, informs strategy decisions about where it's best to allocate resources -- which can include policy, albeit holistically.

Not voting is much harder to read than negative voting, so it's a concomitantly less effective form of expression. Maybe someone was disgusted with all available candidates or maybe they just forgot what day Election Day was; it all goes into the same bin.

Many ballots lack an explicit abstain vote option, which means you have to leave that part of the ballot blank.  This gets tricky, because you have no way of communicating that YES, YOU DID THIS ON PURPOSE on the ballot, and conniving politicians will do everything possible to avoid acknowledging this, even if you go through the exit poll. (the exit poll cannot be tied to the ballot, because that is illegal. It has to be anonymized in both the ballot and the poll, meaning there are disconnected bits of information.)

Explicitly adding an "Abstention" option would solve a great deal of problems.  With it included, I would agree-- exit poll data would be sufficient metadata to cover the "why" part that politicians will want to know. However, without an explicit "abstain" choice, there is no way to disambiguate it from "oops, I forgot that part!", and thus the ballot being fodder for any number of silly things politicians could try to wrangle.