Patience is a very effective strategy. If you support Party A, but Party B has a better candidate with a lower chance of success, and you absolutely must vote, you have two choices - vote for A’s candidate and their bad policies or vote for B’s and support theirs in spite of worse odds. If Party A, your preferred one, loses based on that premise, they would be foolish not to look at the result and realise that Party B’s candidate offered something that was more compelling to the electorate, and they must necessarily adjust accordingly. You think about winning an election, like a sports fan - you should be thinking about the good of the country, and its long-term success. That’s what I addressed, and that’s what I maintain. If you abstain altogether, you also send a message - that message is that the party failed to provide a compelling option and must necessarily change course. That’s how democracy is *supposed* to work.
I don’t see what’s so confusing here. Let’s take a policy-based example instead. You have two parties, the Party of Starving Elderly and the Party of Starving Children. You can choose between one or the other based on your sensibilities, but ultimately you are accepting the premise that one of these groups is going to starve. What you should be doing is rejecting the premise. Yes, you might face some short-term hardship, but you would be making steps towards the realisation of the Non-starvation Party by making both “bad choices” less electable. By doing so you are signifying that starvation is not a serious proposition and we should probably look elsewhere for solutions. By choosing between the two evils you are tacitly supporting one or the other, when the correct choice is to reject them outright. You don’t get to save the children *and* complain about grandma when you voted for grandma to starve - you made your decision at the ballot box.
Ranked voting will improve the odds of third party candidates, but it will not improve the candidates themselves as quickly or effectively as voting based on policy alone. The system is broken because people like you broke it by voting for evils, debating which ones are greater or lesser. You won’t get good outcomes if you keep voting for bad choices. Ranked-based voting without a fundamental change of voting patterns merely allows you to select multiple bad choices ranked from bad to worst. The ranking, by its very nature, will provide *some* insight as far as the electorate’s sensibilities are concerned, but if people continue to vote based on odds of success and team colours, relegating principles to secondary choices, those choices will remain secondary forever. Any vote that isn’t firmly based in principle is a dishonest one, and one not worth casting. Don’t get me wrong - ranked-based voting would be *better*, but it doesn’t address the fundamental problem of treating politics as a team sport - that’s a societal issue, not a process issue.
Let me demonstrate - you’re in a rank-based system and your party has three candidates, A, B and C, with C having the highest odds of success and A having your actual support. You naturally put A at the top of your list, you put B in the middle since you don’t care and leave C last, because worst-case scenario your vote will trickle down to an option you didn’t want, but one that you still consider to be better than the opposition’s D, E or F. Unsurprisingly, C wins, and you contributed to that victory. If you want to vote earnestly, C shouldn’t be on your list at all - you don’t support C. If anything, B is your fallback because it represents stagnation, but even then you’re choosing nothing since stagnation in a poor state of affairs is no different than slow death. Do you get my point? Vote for what you believe in, that’s how it’s meant to work.
Last edited by Foxi4,
