Vote Your Conscience, or your vote is WASTED!
I want to clarify things for those of you who believe that voting in the State of Alabama for someone other that Mitt Romney equals a vote for Barack Obama. First off, Alabama only has 9 electoral votes. Second, you should be more concerned about the party structures than electing one of their hacks. Lastly, voting for someone is, by definition, voting for that person, not for someone else.
To start, as I mentioned, Alabama only has 9 votes in the Electoral College. Alabama is so blindly GOP that if every person who identifies as Democrat or independent combined to vote for one candidate, Romney would still win the state. If, by some miracle, someone other than Romney won, it would still only contribute 9 Electoral College votes to their total. That is not much when there are 539 votes to be cast.
Matter of fact, most states are already decided by the large difference in party preference. The election will be decided by the few states where people who are NOT Paul supporters represent the swing vote. These people want to hear that government will continue to give liberally to all the liberal social programs. They will vote for which ever one gives them the most. These are the people you need to go after.
The reason you have become so concerned about the 'other' side winning is because you've allowed 2 political parties to write all the laws, which now heavily favor them and allows the government to financially support them! The primary elections and caucuses are merely for show, as we've seen, because the party elite simply reverse your vote. They make sure their buddies are nominated, and then fund their party with government money and slant ballot laws to keep anyone else out. If you had any sense of what is going on, you'd never contribute to them again, and be very wary of voting for any candidate from the 2 parties which control almost everything, now.
Last off, when you cast your vote for someone, you are casting your vote for that person, not for someone else. It is that simple. Now, that doesn't mean that the voting apparatus isn't rigged to give your vote to someone else... but that is a different argument altogether. Check out the documentary Hacking Democracy to see what I mean.
There is definitely a need to reform our election process. Instant run-offs would be good but we first need to remove any reference to party or other political advertisements from the ballot. Allowing the people to select a second choice for the office being elected would stop these elections where we have 2 choices who are supported by a tiny minority.
To put it bluntly, if you are trying to bully someone into voting against their conscience, for whatever reason, you are making a huge mistake. Saying that their vote will be counted for someone they diametrically oppose is intellectually dishonest, especially in the State of Alabama. Make things better by being constructive, forcing people to make lesser-of-two-evils choices is just not the answer.
To start, as I mentioned, Alabama only has 9 votes in the Electoral College. Alabama is so blindly GOP that if every person who identifies as Democrat or independent combined to vote for one candidate, Romney would still win the state. If, by some miracle, someone other than Romney won, it would still only contribute 9 Electoral College votes to their total. That is not much when there are 539 votes to be cast.
Matter of fact, most states are already decided by the large difference in party preference. The election will be decided by the few states where people who are NOT Paul supporters represent the swing vote. These people want to hear that government will continue to give liberally to all the liberal social programs. They will vote for which ever one gives them the most. These are the people you need to go after.
The reason you have become so concerned about the 'other' side winning is because you've allowed 2 political parties to write all the laws, which now heavily favor them and allows the government to financially support them! The primary elections and caucuses are merely for show, as we've seen, because the party elite simply reverse your vote. They make sure their buddies are nominated, and then fund their party with government money and slant ballot laws to keep anyone else out. If you had any sense of what is going on, you'd never contribute to them again, and be very wary of voting for any candidate from the 2 parties which control almost everything, now.
Last off, when you cast your vote for someone, you are casting your vote for that person, not for someone else. It is that simple. Now, that doesn't mean that the voting apparatus isn't rigged to give your vote to someone else... but that is a different argument altogether. Check out the documentary Hacking Democracy to see what I mean.
There is definitely a need to reform our election process. Instant run-offs would be good but we first need to remove any reference to party or other political advertisements from the ballot. Allowing the people to select a second choice for the office being elected would stop these elections where we have 2 choices who are supported by a tiny minority.
To put it bluntly, if you are trying to bully someone into voting against their conscience, for whatever reason, you are making a huge mistake. Saying that their vote will be counted for someone they diametrically oppose is intellectually dishonest, especially in the State of Alabama. Make things better by being constructive, forcing people to make lesser-of-two-evils choices is just not the answer.
posted by Tonewah at 6:56 AM
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