If you don't vote today people!

SkepticOne

phantom_lord wrote: »

pretty sure that me voting wouldn't have made a difference either.

And then people wonder why FF get elected repeatedly.

phantom_lord

SkepticOne wrote: »

And then people wonder why FF get elected repeatedly.

are u serious?

SkepticOne

phantom_lord wrote: »

are u serious?

The idea that your vote won't make a difference so why bother is also a tacit acceptance of the status quo related to the point made earlier by Macros42.

It often expresses itself as "sure one's as bad as the other", "better the devil you know" etc. Unfortunately this is a very common sentiment in Ireland. So we get the same shower in over and over again.

joseph brand

DeVore wrote: »

Whether I vote or not has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on my right to voice a complaint or the likely validity of that complaint.

Not one person in this thread has shown me a counter to that statement.

DeV.

It doesn't make much sense for someone to complain about the government, and then, when handed an opportunity to voice an opinion and vote, they turn it down, due to apathy.

Where would apathy get us? I'm no fan of apathy.

osnola ibax

Maybe this was mentioned already but didn't apathy nearly have a fascist dictator elected as French prime minister a few years back

Serenity Now!

phantom_lord wrote: »

pretty sure that me voting wouldn't have made a difference either.

If the percentage of people who don't bother their arse...erm...actually bothered their arse to vote then the difference would of course be effective.
In local elections, there are people running who are attached to no parties, run on local issues yet you still can't be bothered??

You not only get the government you deserve, you get the council, local committees and European representitive you deserve.
Well done.

DeVore

All of which has nothing to do with the point in question in the OP.

A complaint is either valid, to you, or not. Its source is irrelevant.

Voting or not has no impact on your right to complain. Others may choose to not listen to such complaints but thats their personal emotive decision to restrict themselves.

DeV.

SkepticOne

There's a crucial difference between having the right to complain and the general right of freedom of expression which I think might be being missed here.

Generally when people talk about the right to complain they mean that you have a right to have that complaint heard and considered, not merely your right to voice your opinion (which you are constitutionally guaranteed within reason).

So if you are complaining about the result of an election, why should your complaint be taken seriously if you did not take the opportunity to vote when you had the chance. It is like complaining to your local authority for non-delivery of services you never applied for in the first place! You don't have the right of complaint in this situation. Your complaint is not valid but your general right to express dissatisfaction however unjustified remains.

conchubhar1

DeVore wrote: »

Voting or not has no impact on your right to complain.

yes it does


you had a choice to make a different choice and did not - therefore you can not complain about those in power

TheInquisitor

I'll put it to you like this Dev. Politicians can see who voted in the election and who didn't and if they have 2 people conflicting over a proposal etc. All other things being equal would they choose the person that might have voted for them or the person that never votes. I know who'd id side with, the person that made an effort not the waster

phantom_lord

Serenity Now! wrote: »

If the percentage of people who don't bother their arse...erm...actually bothered their arse to vote then the difference would of course be effective.
In local elections, there are people running who are attached to no parties, run on local issues yet you still can't be bothered??

You not only get the government you deserve, you get the council, local committees and European representitive you deserve.
Well done.

http://foxwoodsfiend.com/?p=32

So my brother sends me a link to this article (blog site’s messing up links apparently, so you’ll have to cut and paste):

http://blog.syracuse.com/news/2008/02/dead_heat_obama_and_clinton_ea.html

and he’s all like “there goes your non-voting idea!” Given that he’s not an idiot, I have to assume that he was being sarcastic that this tie undermines the argument against voting. There are a lot of responses to the supposed relevance of this tie to my anti-voting belief. Before we get into it, I’d like to make it clear why I think voting is irrational (unless you have a perverse preference for waiting in lines and pulling on levers in little curtained-off squares in libraries or school gymnasiums, in which case feel free to vote). For the purposes of discussion, I’m only going to talk about federal elections (although most of my arguments are applicable if tweaked to more local elections). Basically, for your vote to have a payoff it has to be the deciding vote in an election: your candidate of choice has to win by one vote for your vote to make any difference in the election result. Any other difference your vote would make would be so negligible as to be irrelevant (people protest vote for Nader, but does anybody notice or care if he gets 3,758,483 or 3,758,482 votes in your state? Nobody remembers exact election tallies and the numbers involved in voting are so huge that one more or less vote will never be noticed).

But it’s practically impossible for your vote to be the deciding vote. Mathematically speaking, the chances of an election coming down to one vote are infinitesimal (I don’t have the exact numbers on hand, but different political scientists assuming different distributions of voter preferences in different-sized states have pegged the chances as low as one in three hundred million). Even if your vote is the one that matters, it has to be the difference in getting your candidate elected, so on a presidential level you have to compound the chance the election is a one-vote election with the the probability that the allocation of your state’s electoral votes will be the difference between your candidate winning and your candidate losing. If you are the deciding vote in Massachusetts for Dukakis but Regan still wins every other state, it doesn’t really matter. So let’s not forget there’s a cost to voting: the opportunity cost of what you would have done with your time and the bother of actually going to the voting booth. It just doesn’t make sense to incur these costs on a regular basis, negligible as they may be, when the payoff of doing so is a one in hundreds of millions chance of having your guy elected. If you think it is worth your time, then running a basic EV calculation where you value your time even at something low like $5/hour and solving for the value you have to place on getting your candidate elected leads to you having to value your candidate’s election in the millions (if not hundreds of millions) of dollars. Anyway, onto why this Barack/Hillary tie doesn’t undermine this (admittedly hastily fleshed out) argument.

First of all, the article notes that “The tie is likely to be broken when elections officials recanvass the voting machines and add in the absentee and affidavit votes.” In other words, even if this near-impossible occurrence happens, it won’t end up staying a tied vote anyway because any election that ever comes down to 1 vote or is a tie will always involve a recount. So even if your vote is the deciding vote, it won’t be because there will be a recount. This is true of just about any election in the United States (even my Student Body President vote in high school came down to 8votes and they let people who hadn’t voted vote for some reason), so the recount makes it completely irrational to vote

Second of all, the winner of Syracuse’s primary election is not going to be a determining factor in who gets the nomination. I guarantee you that in the end result, if the Democratic nominee had lost Syracuse he still would have had enough delegates to secure the nomination. The Syracuse vote had something like 12,300 voters participating in the election: obviously the smaller the body of voters the more likely it is an election will be tied, but most elections that have few voters end up being somewhat irrelevant in terms of changing public policy or having any real effect on the legislative process

Thirdly, it is important to note that this is being results-oriented. This is like saying “You see? I told you I should have played the lottery every day for my whole life! I won!!!” For every voter who might regret not having voted in Syracuse (assuming there’s no recount), there will be hundreds of millions of non-voters throughout history who will never have to think that.

If you think voting still makes sense, feel free to make some comments explaining why. I’ll respond to them until you’re all convinced. And don’t give me the “what if everybody thought this way??? The system would collapse!” argument. If everybody thought this way, I’d vote and be the only voter and be president for life. But how you act has no influence on whether or not other people vote. Everybody else will do whatever they do anyway regardless of whether or not they know you vote (hell, I’ve convinced judges in debate rounds that voting is fundamentally irrational and they still vote). The “what if everybody thought this way” argument is a common theme in discussions of most collective action problems. Voting is basically a collective action problem: if every individual acts rationally, the system suffers and everybody is made worse off. But that doesn’t make it rational to vote, it just highlights the tension between the inefficacy of the individual and the need for individuals to act in concert to achieve a certain result.

phantom_lord

even if my vote did matter, and i did elect a candidate of my choosing it would be lagely irrelevent, a local independent isn't going to do anything, and i have no interest in the "punish ff" campaign. voting for the lesser gob****e will do no good imo. instead voting would feel like an endorsment of the system, when reform is so badly needed. it's laughable that people actually think that voting for anyone that isn't ff is going to make a difference.

we need a new party for starters, it's about time we moved on from civil war politics imo.

El Stuntman wrote: »

Fianna Fail have proven themselves both incompetent (in the extreme!) and corrupt. Sorry to be so blunt for any FF'ers on here but it's obvious that they are not worthy of holding any office and we were idiots to be conned by Bertie (Incompetence and Corruption personnified) in 2002 and 2007.

I almost joined Fine Gael at the start of this year and indeed made the first steps, however their public pronouncements over the last fortnight have convinced me that they have nearly as little idea of how to formulate a coherent policy response than FF. They do seem more honest than FF which is something I suppose.

Labour are a tool of the unions who sadly are now a regressive force in Irish society (look at the ESB pushing through pay rises under threat of strike action this week). This is not what Connolly or Larkin envisioned.

The PDs are defunct.

Sinn Fein are beyond the pale.

Independents are a waste of a vote.

What I see an overwhelming need for is a new centrist party that stands on a platform of two simple core ideals:

1. Honesty. We need a government that is not beholden to narrow sectoral interests; be they developers\ banks\unions etc and we need a government that will operate at all times in the broadest national interest. We also need a government that will explain its actions, in plain language (not the nonsensical jargon that Cowen and Lenihan have been spouting) at all times. This party's funding needs to be 100% above board with full and complete public disclosure.

2. Competence. We need a government that is comprised of people who have significant real-world experience in all arenas; doctors, accountants, managers, transport experts, bankers, engineers. The last thing we need is more career politicans who inherited their daddy's seat and have no idea of the real world outside of Leinster House, their constituency office, their party and their financial backers.

is anyone with me on this or am I just talking through my arse?

we also have to move away from the localized what have you done for me, who's your family, what has he done for the party nature of irish politics and move towards something far more meaningful.

i can't indentify a candidate that is genuinely reformist, and i don't have the time or resources to create my own party, galvanize support, and take the more direct approach. i also don't really think ireland would be really interested in what it actually needs, the present system is far too entrenched for it to be changed, and people too small minded. it's not apathy or ignororance of politics on my part, as some of you suggested, it's just severe prolonged frustration with the political system.

O'Coonassa

TheInquisitor wrote: »

Don't bother complaining about anything that goes wrong in the future. There's a friend of the family who always complains about the government so i always ask did she vote, which shuts her up because she never does. Vote or shut up complaining about things!

Clearly you've voted for some or other incapable eejit and the damage they get to do will be your fault. How can you encourage a system whereby people with no proven aptitude for the task are left in charge of the running of the country? How can you possibly think that such a system will not go wrong in the future? How do you have any right to complain when it does? It's not the people who don't vote who should shut up, rather the ones who actively encourage the lunacy by voting.

TheInquisitor

O'Coonassa wrote: »

Clearly you've voted for some or other incapable eejit and the damage they get to do will be your fault. How can you encourage a system whereby people with no proven aptitude for the task are left in charge of the running of the country? How can you possibly think that such a system will not go wrong in the future? How do you have any right to complain when it does? It's not the people who don't vote who should shut up, rather the ones who actively encourage the lunacy by voting.

Oh sorry o'coonassa, our country would be in great shape then if none of us voted. Sure why have a democracy at all. What would you do to change the system of voting? Dictator for life? Communism?

phantom_lord

don't be so flippant.

O'Coonassa

TheInquisitor wrote: »

Oh sorry o'coonassa, our country would be in great shape then if none of us voted. Sure why have a democracy at all. What would you do to change the system of voting? Dictator for life? Communism?

I don't think we do have a democracy at all. Democracy first and foremost requires properly informed and educated citizens. We need a system that places science, logic and reason before the rhetoric and adversarial party politics driven by the traditions of dead men.

The crop of unqualified and largely disinterested pigs at the trough would surely diminish if a TD earned only the minimum wage. They'd also surely behave themselves better if elected on a yearly basis. If political parties and party lines and whips were abolished then independant TD's would be free to vote according to conscience. I'm sure there are other improvements such as these that could be made.