Remider that voting in a Democracy is the bare minimum.

Everday citizens can protest, attend town halls, call their elected officials (or their opponents) and make their views heard. You can donate money, and if you can't donate money, you can donate time, and if you can't donate time, you can bring attention to issues that you want to change in your everyday life.

Voting is the most important thing you can do right now, but don't forget the other stuff. Behind every politician is a team, behind that team are supporters, and behind the supporters are voters. You get to choose your level of engagement.

No shame on people that only vote. That's better than 4 out 5 other Americans this year.

Saved

Presumably an unopposed seat on a ballot proves some generalized point about elections or America or something.

The meme also assumes billionares are spending all that money on one side. They spend it on both (bankman-fried who publicly donated to dems and secretley donated to republicans so he could guide regulations, have the ear of government, maybe even get an edge on people.) So its not like the parties truly are that different.

Didn’t Morello advocate for non-voting?

Here in Australia one of our wealthiest people, Gina Rinehart, is a very vocal supporter of a party, One Nation, who's base is predominantly disenfranchised disadvantaged Aussie battlers.

Its nonsensical to me that even an idiot could think that a billionaires interests might align with their own.

We did, in 2020. What is different now?

The vote allocation system was very purposefully mathematically designed for exactly this outcome.

More than once I've read in The Guardian some columnist or other justifying Britains voting system (also First Past The Post, like the US), which for example will give absolute parliamentary majorities on a mere 34% of the vote, as being a good thing because it brings "stability".

You know what's "stable" - swamps.

Yeah it's depressing how few seem to get that the billions being dumped into politics aren't to make one party or the other win, it's to make it so that there will always be only two parties, both of whom are friendly to billionaires.

It's called the spoiler effect and it's an issue of the voting system of "First Past the Post".

Imagine you have 4 parties, A,B, C and D. Let's say A, B, and C largely align on issues and D is the outlier. While 70% of the population wants either A,B, or C, if the vote gets split evenly then we see D wins despite on wining 30% of votes.

C says "Not cool man. I'm giving up and telling all my voters to vote for B". Now you have a three party system.

D isn't dumb and so he throws propaganda and budget to draw voters to A despite not agreeing with their policies at all. They are incentivized to split the vote because of how the system is designed. Voters get split between A and B again making 33% the victory threshold. D ekes out another win despite not reaching a majority. A and B decide to join forces to never let D win again and boom two party system.

Numbers are hyperbolic for demonstration but this is how it works. It's why sometimes third party campaigns get backed by the political parties least in alignment with them.

You will never solve the two party system without changing voting to one that negates the spoiler effect.

Yep, but this must be accomplished mainly outside of current elections - making sure that candidates that align with this view are even available hangs on a lot more than a single date to vote. Telling people to just not care because it all sucks is the last stage in a long process where viable candidates did not get enough support the rest of the time.

The intelligent thing to do is to vote for the major party that is objectively better than the other major party, while volunteering to help any 3rd parties you have interest in so they slowly become more viable. If everyone did this, we'd be in better shape in the short run by electing the non-FelonRapistPedoTraitor party while making things better in the long run by elevating at least one 3rd party.

Cuz right now no 3rd party is even really trying to be viable. So it just isn't an option. People have to help them for that to happen.

Only one of those parties runs candidates that have election reform on their platform. The parties aren't the same.