Oddbean new post about login | logout truth told, i have some pretty extreme no government views. but something about the “voting is pointless” crowd smacks of wounded baby, or psyop to me. but i don’t presume to tell anyone how they must live so i just think it.
I kind of feel the same way, despite my extremely anti-government tendencies. I do think voting at least on the local level can affect change. And I've always voted even if it was just a write-in because I always felt like not voting was a cop-out in some way. Like you're not participating in the system so you don't really have a say. Even if not voting is a protest because you don't agree with how corrupt and fucked up the system is currently. It's an argument that I can completely understand. It would be really interesting to see some law in the U.S. form about votes of no confidence or voter threshold turnouts like if a certain threshold doesn't turn out or if there's enough votes of no confidence then elections will have to be ran over again until either enough people participate or somebody legitimately wins.
i vote in the local stuff. I'd love to see ranked choice voting too.
We have RCV here in Alaska. It seems like a solution in search of a problem. In many races, the Republican and Democrat candidates that come in 3rd or 4th place in the primaries, winning the right to appear on general election ballot, drop out to avoid splitting the vote and hurting their party. This allows the some oddball 5th and 6th place candidates to end up on the ballot. Eric Hafner is on ballot for US House even though he has never lived in Alaska and is doing 20 years in prison for making bomb threats.