Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.

Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.

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petralithic a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's more that voting third party in a first-past-the-post voting scheme is systemically pointless.

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whoooboyy a day ago | parent | next [-]

Parent poster said to stop voting for bad candidates. I said you would be mocked/judged/told off for doing so. And here we are.

	▲	EraYaN a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well you should mostly do that in the primaries, when you are down to two, pick the least evil one.
	▲	petralithic 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.

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onraglanroad 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It obviously isn't since the UK, for example, has fptp for general elections and far more than two parties.

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ethin a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.

	▲	mindslight 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold. Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)