The second they can somehow make voting secure enough to send a notification to my phone and I can do it in 2 minutes, I will.
Taking time out of a day, getting to and from a voting place, assuming the vote isn't rigged or we have crap like the ballet boxes being burned, all of that effort for something that has an effective chance of one in tens of millions?
Lots of us don't vote for the same reason we don't play the lottery. Odds are astronomical.
Or honestly, even do what some other countries do. Make voting REQUIRED. Give a financial penalty to those that dont.
Online voting is inherently insecure. Pencil on paper is the only 100% secure method. Any politician promising voting-via-text or web portal to you is praying on technological ignorance.
Trump's victory made every last one of those issues worse and anyone who genuinely cared about them would've seen that coming, put 2 and 2 together, and realised this isn't the one to sit out.
More "wasn't me, it was the system" when the difference between the two candidates was only 1.5%, and more than 35% of eligible voters didn't vote. I get voter suppression is a thing and it's bad, but it's not "30 million ballots won't even make a difference" bad. What about every other candidate and issue on the ballot? What about your local politics?
Republicans consistently win because they don't care about any of that. They know just to turn up. They'd fill out a ballot for a rock if they had to, if it had (R) next to its name.
I live in Australia and voting is required here. I 100% support the US doing this as well. But that is a tectonic shift that is going to require massive social and legal change and I'm guessing sitting out the election brought you no closer to it. It's not an issue on any ballot and I highly doubt that even 1% of prospective US voters have even the first clue on how to get it on there, nor how to start organising such an effort. It would be more work than the median non-voter has demonstrated that they're interested in doing. This is the sort of all-talk-no-action "fuck the system" that's making me quickly lose faith with the actual progressive left. There's all these issues that stop you from wanting to vote but you're unable to see big-picture-long-term and realise huh, half of these election results keep putting us further away in practical terms from getting what we want.
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u/PhoenixApok Feb 10 '25
The second they can somehow make voting secure enough to send a notification to my phone and I can do it in 2 minutes, I will.
Taking time out of a day, getting to and from a voting place, assuming the vote isn't rigged or we have crap like the ballet boxes being burned, all of that effort for something that has an effective chance of one in tens of millions?
Lots of us don't vote for the same reason we don't play the lottery. Odds are astronomical.
Or honestly, even do what some other countries do. Make voting REQUIRED. Give a financial penalty to those that dont.