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When next you all hear from me, I shall have voted. I shall not vote based on parties. I shall vote based on issues, and upon candidates, their integrity, their records; what they believe in, and what they stand for. I will not be voting for anyone who can come up with nothing better to say for themselves than "Well, my opponent sucks."
What about you? Will you vote today? If not, why not?
The United States is a constitutional republic, a representative democracy. Our government is our responsibility. If you, as a citizen, won't vote, you are failing in your duty and responsibility as a citizen. I don't even care all that much if you vote against everything I stand for and believe in, so long as you vote, and vote honestly what you believe in, not just what someone with a sharp suit and a whole lot of money told you you should. It doesn't matter who's wearing the suit; you're casting your vote, not theirs. Let them vote how they want.
So go out today, and cast YOUR vote. Because it's your country.
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In a nutshell, American politics is an economics playground which has no income differentials and is totally zero sum. If you want the most money, the only way you can do it is by appealing to the most people — each "purchase" of your product is one less purchase every other vendor can get. This drives the parties towards the center in a big–ass hurry, to the point where the parties are statistically indistinguishable from each other — and practically indistinguishable, too.
If you want to make a difference in American politics, don't waste your time voting. Take the time you'd spend voting and instead think for yourself. Clear your mind of dogma and cant, banish illusions, challenge your own assumptions. Start over from first principles. See where you wind up — and have the courage to follow your conclusions, even if they are at odds with your convictions.
That's political involvement worth a damn.
Voting is irrelevant.
(Strangely, I did not harbor this opinion until I spent three years doing Ph.D. studies in electronic voting. I guess you could say I took my own advice, started from first principles, didn't like where I wound up, but decided to follow the math anyway.)
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One you win at the local level, you build up the kind of backing and support you need for the higher offices. Almost no one wants to go to that kind of effort, however.
Also, stop focusing on the State and National offices. Huge amounts of policy and authority rest in small, local offices that no one pays any attention to. Go back through your voter's guide and look at all those random School Board and County Assessor and whatever that are up for election (depending on how your local government is set up). Almost no one has any clue who those people are who're running. No reason it couldn't be you.
* - and that $5 was just cos of my funky district, so I had to drive to Santa Fe, rather than the county clerk's office, to turn in my ballot access petition due to having two precincts in another county.
OTOH, I woulda been boned if I'd won. NM House is an unpaid position, so I would've been driving home every night to go to work and back to Santa Fe in the mornings. That woulda sucked.
However, you don't have to win, especially as a third party, to make a pretty big difference. Any kind of reasonable showing will get your local pols attention.
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Will you vote for "Opposed To Gay Marriage", or "Opposed To Gay Marriage"?
Will you vote for "Let's Jack The Public For $850 Billion", or "Let's Jack The Public For $850 Billion"?
Will you vote for "Let's Intimidate Political Speakers" or "Let's Outlaw Political Speech"? (Obama's campaign has not been kind to people speaking ill of him, even resorting to legal threats on multiple occasions; and McCain–Feingold is simply a travesty.)
Will you vote for…?
You get the idea, I hope. The candidates are essentially Coke and Pepsi. Sure, there's a small flavor difference between them, but they're basically the exact same thing: sugary, caffeinated, carbonated cola beverages.
I'm fed up with it. I refuse to cast a vote and thereby explicitly give my assent to the system. I do not assent. I want things to change, I want important things to change, before we all go off the deep end.
The only way to do that is to get people to think about the fact they've been settling for the exact same carbonated cola beverage for the last God knows how long, and persuading them to demand something different. Once the polls change, once people start saying "no, I'm dissatisfied with both parties," then the parties will change to adapt to it.
But once the candidates are on the ballots, then it's too late to do anything. The real elections are the ones that lead up to it. This is why I'm a huge, passionate fan of primary elections; that, more than anything else, is where voters actually have an ability to change political campaigns, especially given how few people participate in primaries. If you can organize just 100 people for your given non–cola candidate in a primary… wow. Magic can happen.
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I've spent a lot of time in this exact same mindset.
The empire rolls on, regardless of which emporer we elect.
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Which is why I keep repeating the message that a vote for the lesser evil is still a vote for evil, and that if people don't like what either of the major parties are doing, then they need to stop voting for one of them to keep the other out.
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