Abd ul offers Gold Plated advice here!
It is properly our civic duty to vote, and thus our duty to first
determine what candidates can be expected to best serve our needs.
However, if our determining is that voting for some candidates is more
likely to hurt, rather than help, our interests, we must not vote for
such. Doing a write-in may be helpful if we must reject all nominated
candidates.
On Mar 6, 2010, at 9:15 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
[EM] Burlington Vermont repeals IRV 52% to 48%
At 02:34 PM 3/6/2010, Raph Frank wrote:
In any case, you really should cast all 6 votes.
Not necessarily. What if you only recognize the names of three? Or
what if you only support three and have no opinion on the rest,
sufficient to prefer one from another? The optimal vote is actually,
then, to vote just for three. Yes, you are wasting half your voting
power, but if you don't know what to do with it, using it just
introduces noise into the system, and might quite possibly be a vote
cast based on the worst kinds of media manipulation, creating vague
impressions about candidates not firmly based in fact.
"Wasting" is not the right word. If you did not see any candidate to
vote for, you had no power to waste - as Abd ul writes, odds are that
voting here is as likely to be destructive as to be productive.
That people consider it some kind of obligation to *vote*, per se,
regardless of how well the voter understands the situation, is part
of the problem with the system. There's lots of propaganda out that
that proposes voting as a civic duty, when the real duty would be to
investigate situations, become knowledgeable about them, and *then*
vote.
Or, alternatively, decide whom to trust, based on the best
information available, and preferably, even, some level of personal
contact either with the potential advisor, or someone who knows the
advisor, and then follow that person's recommendations, assuming
that it's reasonable that this person knows more than you do.
This is equivalent to putting all your eggs in one basket and then
watching that basket closely. It's a reasonable strategy, because
the capacity to watch all the eggs separately might not be there.
Most people have other things to do with their lives. Politics is
far from everything, important as it is.
A variation on this, with partisan elections, is to adhere to a
political party. Probably more dangerous, in fact.
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