this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Here in Australia we have a public holiday for voting, mandatory voting, preferential voting, and every school, and hundreds of other community locations become polling locations. I can walk to 3 from my house in less than 10 minutes.
Why did Americans vote for the system they have? Americans voted for first past the post, gerrymandering, the right to throw away their only voice. That's not a great electoral system to vote for.
Canada requires employers to give a few hours to vote and also makes seemingly every school a polling station. Every time I've voted, the polling station was walking distance. Notably, though, we don't have mandatory voting. And our turnout is horrendous.
We were also going to have electoral reform, but it got canceled and so few people cared that the party that cancelled it got reelected. It's frustrating the level of apathy many Canadians have. Provincial elections are even worse, despite the fact that healthcare and housing are big, big issues that are under provincial jurisdiction.
I'll always support mandatory voting, the fine is $50 if you don't, but we get a day off, voting booths are close, we have pre-polling locations for a week beforehand, and nationally accessible postal voting, just for that added convenience. It really is more of a hassle to not vote than to vote and the process rarely takes long.
When your system is built around mandatory voting it becomes mandatory to make it easy to vote.
And you're right, apathy is a problem, but it's a carrot and stick problem with plenty of viable solutions. You tell someone they have to have an opinion or lose $50 they can come up with one pretty easily. Then it becomes an education problem.
But those trying to subvert power don't want fair elections where every voter has to give their 2c, or $50, whichever the case may be, because every non-voter is already on their team, they just have to win the rest.
You're right. It's not.
The short answer is that most people who vote care more about who wins elections than what our legislators actually do. Look at Biden, who hasn't fulfilled hardly any of his promises and we've even regressed significantly under his leadership, losing abortion rights and seeing increasing scarcity of housing, but 49% of voters will loudly and proudly argue that re-electing him is a moral imperative rather than demanding better from the Democratic Party.
And the fascists won't have to lie about what a shitty president he is, so his inaction is going to pave the way for us to become an overtly fascist state.
I'm not even American, but don't blame Democrats for the failures of the other voters. They at least vote for progression rather than regression of Republicans.
That would be like me blaming superman for not being enough superman when there's 9 lex luthors in the room. Fuck off with that disingenuous bullshit.
He says right before blaming Biden for the actions of the Republican senate, house, and supreme court.
How exactly?
Minimum wage / Living wages, Abortion, Housing Scarcity, War Spending, Health Care, Education, Fascism, Police Violence
Every single one of these has worsened and Biden had total congressional control for the first two years of his presidency.
The presidency and Congress were both Dem-controlled. I am, in fact, blaming them for their inaction.
It doesn't matter what they say they support if the end result is conservative rule regardless of who's in power.
You'd shoot an ally rather than an enemy. You are the problem.
You think yourself uniquely cognizant, you're not, you're the typical American voter, and we all know how cluey they are because non-Americans know the failures of the American electoral system and their politics better than they do.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I wish I could say the same.