2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
Being from an “every vote counts” country with compulsory voting, this seems like such an alien response to me.
The US would benefit from being a compulsory voting country. There’s a couple of ways of conducting polls - two of them are “likely voters” and “eligible voters.” The LV model can vary from poll to poll but usually has some criterion like “voted in the last election.”
The LV polls are usually to the right of the EV polls, and the conventional wisdom is that the greater the turnout, the better the democrats do. Republicans on the other hand are generally trying to make it harder to vote.
So compulsory voting with vote by mail would pull things a bit to the left, at least for a few years.
Let this be a warning to you, then. We are part of the same species and we have the same vulnerabilities in our socially constructed systems give or take. Without constant vigilance this could happen to your country. Do not trust anyone who has power over you. Ever.
Does your country use First Past The Post elections? Because that’s how we do things in North America, and all it does is boil all of politics down to 2 parties.
I don’t even have a clue what it means. Sounds like a horse race or a running race, except yank elections never have any politicians fit enough to swim in a race, let alone run in it.
No, we all vote (unless we are rich enough to pay the non-voting fine, many well-off people choose not to vote and pay the fine) and the votes are all counted. I assume you mean they only count USian votes until one team has “enough”? Seems very corrupt, but it doesn’t mean your vote isn’t important.
North America has a lot of countries in it, you don’t seem to realise that?
Found the Aussie 🦘