#NOT VOTING

[the-dead-gay-oscars]

POLL 1

Annnnnnnd we are GO on Marauscars Poll Number One! This is a series we're going to be doing as a hype for the Marauscars "official dates."

This isn't voting for the "Best" categories-- this is just for fun, to see what we're all thinking!

Now without further ado.....

First and incredibly important question! :

Thank you for your support!

[unofficial-project-2025]

I'm sorry to everyone like me who supports Palestine, but not voting is a bad idea and third parties don't have any chances of winning, especially now.

Because Trump supports Israel even more than Biden. And unfortunately, republicans WILL vote for him, and if you know what Project 2025 is, you know why Trump needs to lose.

I'm sorry to say this, but we need to vote Blue this year. Third parties don't have time to win and Trump is a horrible person.

Please, don't let Project 2025 happen.

Edit: fixed some grammar issues.

[speakingthetruth25]

To all third party and abstinence voters, I hope your happy. We told you Kamala was better than Trump. We told you he would implement project 2025. WE TOLD YOU QUEERS AND IMMIGRANTS WOULD BE IN DANGER

But you wanted so bad to be a little saint. To shame others say oh I won’t have blood on my hands Kamala is just as bad as trump. The politics of united states is less important that the plights of palestine . Im a good person. You focused on Palestine when we were screaming that trump would hurt us all

Are you happy? Trump did the ceasefire, but look what you done. Trump put horrific people in congress, we have Elon doing a nazi salute, he’s taken away dei, he’s targeting trans people, HE PARDONED JANUARY 6.

I hope you suffer.You fucked around now you find out

[skadi-gemini]

You can’t be Pro Palestine and turn around to vote for fuckin Biden. It’s showing your performative activism.

[convertgrapeling]

If anyone ever calls you "privileged" for not wanting to vote for a centrist or centre-right candidate in any election anywhere, you can pretty much assume they have nothing useful or insisghtful to say about anything.

The least privileged people are those who consistently choose not to vote at all because nobody represents their interests, as well as those who cannot vote because they've been deprived of that right. Every election confirms that people living in poverty and people from marginalised groups are most likely to abstain from voting. The least privileged people are not voting Biden or Starmer or Macron or Trudeau, believe me. The ability to ignore the victims of their policies is a privilege in itself.

And frankly it says something about you if you believe that people who don't have "privilege" are less willing to stand by their principles than anyone else.

[originalleftist]

I think a big part of the whole idea of "protest voting", or not voting as protest, stems from shear impatience. Understandable impatience, sometimes, because some things should not have to be endured, even for a moment, but nonetheless. There isn't a candidate who will give me everything I want now (this is literally impossible), so I'm going to just say "both sides are just as bad", and not participate. This might feel righteous, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything, except maybe help the worst candidate/the one with the most fanatical base win by dividing the opposition. I think another part of this, in the US, is the fixation on the Presidency over everything else. "I don't like Biden so I won't vote." Or, "I didn't get who I wanted in the Presidential primary so it's rigged/both sides are just as bad/there's no point to every trying to change anything." The Presidency is seen as the Grand Prize in US politics (and a lot of people greatly overestimate its power), and so people want to focus on that (see for example the chronically abysmal turnout in midterms historically, and also in local elections). But parties and movements are built from the ground up. Third parties always try to go straight for the presidency, but they haven't built up a strong, credible nation-wide base of support to make that run. Ultimately, I think even a lot of support for violent revolution/political violence very obviously traces back to this same impulse, this same impatience- people assume (likely conditioned by a diet of fictional media where the Lone Rogue Hero With A Gun gets the bad guys and saves the day) that violence is a shortcut, a faster, more efficient way to get "real change" than all that messy "politics" (this is a fundamentally authoritarian and even fascist worldview, and doesn't really hold up when you look at the history of long, grinding civil wars that often replace one bad regime with another, or even outright fail to overthrow the ruling government). You can even go deeper, more fundamental, and say that this same impulse improbably behind a lot of the appeal of apocalypse prophecies, which tend to be followed by a better world being reborn after all the evildoers are swept away (I've remarked before, as have others, on the similarities between "accelerationist" politics and "End Times" prophecies). But the truth- the truth that nobody wants to hear, but must understand-is that there is no fast, easy shortcut to change. Breaking "the system" (which isn't all that easy) doesn't mean that a better alternative automatically appears in its place (we can also talk here about the mythologizing of a "state of nature"). Major, substantive, lasting change is hard, and it takes time, and it means a lot of work building a movement, working out the nitty-gritty details and, yes, making compromises. And nobody wants to hear that. But it's the truth. There is no magic, short-cut "I win" button that "the establishment" has successfully hidden from you.

[bluepecanpie]

UK tumblr

I'm not gonna vote. Don't ask me to vote. Don't try to guilt trip me into some BS about 'tactical voting', or worse 'harm reduction' *vomit*. Any government that comes in is going to be bland, managerial, authoritarian, and racist. Fuck off with this "the Tories are uniquely bad, so hold your nose and vote Labour led by Keir 'Israel has a right to turn off tap water and power in Gaza' Starmer". GTFOH with that.

[thelastrefrigerator]

If you live in a democratic country. But you hate the country, hate it's leadership, hate everyone you live close to, and have no intention of voting to make any of it better (and have enough resources to emigrate), then why don't you just leave?

There is an entire world of countries, so go find one that fits your beliefs.

[ultramarine316]

Not voting because neither party is good enough is a lot like when Americans who were mad that France declined to help us invade Iraq went out and bought French wine just so that they could film themselves dumping it down a sewer drain, in that they are both really fucking stupid things to do.

[agent-bash]

As a union worker do you think it's fair that less than 40% of the SAG-AFTRA union get to determined the ratification of the contract?

...Welcome to democracy?

Yes, it's completely fair. It is also important to note that this is the highest ratification turnout SAG-AFTRA's has had in years.

So, if members of a union decided not to vote on the matter in the weeks they had to cast an electronic ballot, that's fine. It's their right. Just like it's their right in a political election. But it does mean, in technicality, that they voted to ratify the deal. Because that's the side that won, and they did nothing to even try to change it.

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

In case you still don't feel it after reading the above, I find it sometimes helps to take these things to their logical conclusion.

What happens if everyone boycotts except one guy? The company can't make any money and goes bust. They have one customer and they can't make money from that.

What happens if everybody refuses to vote except one guy? Well, he essentially gets to control the entire election. His vote is the only vote that counts.

Clearly, neither of these extremes will literally happen; they're extremes. But hopefully it illustrates how as the number of remaining customers gets smaller that's a good thing for the boycotters and a bad thing for the company, whereas as the number of remaining voters gets smaller that's a bad thing for the abstainers and a good thing for the remaining voters (and therefore a good thing for whichever political party has supporters that are voting).

Finally, if you've read all this and still want to protest by not voting, at the very least turn up and spoil your ballot. If you protest by not turning up you will be written off as lazy. They won't know that you're "protesting". If you spoil your ballot then you cede the little power you have (which I think is a terrible tradeoff as described above) but it does at least get recorded as an abstention instead of "just didn't turn up". (Also, this way you don't get to be lazy and justify it to yourself by pretending you're protesting. You want to protest? Get your arse down to the polling centre. Otherwise you're just pretending.)

But yeah. Don't do that. Vote. My god, vote.

I know the US government acts like a corporation but it’s not.

Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.

The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.

So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.

It’s not a boycot. Abstaining doesn’t take power from the government. It just reduces the number of people they feel answerable to.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

[useless-englandfacts]

oh someone at the guardian has lost the will to live

[panspanther]

let tRump back in and we get more genocide, more ecoside, the obscenely rich get richer, the rest of us get poorer, we end up in a dictatorship, immigrants are fucked, lgbtq are fucked and women lose their rights, not just abortion rights, divorce rights, etc.

They crave the days when you could beat your wife and burn a cross on the lawn of your new black neighbors.

We may not have as much freedom as we want, but I guarantee there will be even less if MAGA succeeds.

The leftists who believe they have the moral high ground for not voting for either candidate because the system as a whole supports genocide (they are correct in this) - don't realize that the moral high ground is LOST when their lack of compromise DIRECTLY causes even more genocide.

"The democrats will miss my vote when they lose because of (insert bad policy here)"

Cool. The non politicians you fuck over with this holier than thou mentality will miss MUCH more than that.

[luigicat117]

I couldn't have said it better myself.