iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid:
hey so we americans live in a gerrymandered hellscape but i literally cannot emphasize enough how important it’s going to be to vote anyway during these upcoming 2022 elections, and that goes quadruple if you live in pennsylvania
VOTE!
No matter how bad the voting system, the only way to get what you want is to vote for the candidate who will best represent you. Anyone who tells you your only choice is to vote strategically or tactically for a candidate who won’t is trying to get you to vote for what they want!
Don’t do it!
The best fix is voting system reform to some form of #ProportionalRepresentation, but that will never happen until people stop voting for the same old two party duopoly that benefits from the status quo.
These days they use opinion polls as propaganda— to convince voters their team will win no matter how you vote. The thing we should have learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that anyone with enough money can have a pretty good idea of how many people will vote, making it easy to know who to ask to get the answers they need to convince you not to vote or to vote the way they want.
Voter suppression techniques help drive low voter turnout. The duopoly would rather you gave up in despair and didn’t vote at all if you aren’t going to vote for them.
Do it!
When more voters don’t vote than elect the government, the duopoly wins and citizens lose. There are people trying to make real change, all you have to do is figure out which of them will make the changes you want.
Then vote for what *you* want. If you can, volunteer for or donate to the candidate who will best represent you. And encourage your family and friends to vote for what they want— especially those you know don’t vote. But it is super important not to tell them how to vote, because that’s one of the main reasons people don’t vote.
Why waste your time voting if you can’t vote for what you want?
But being open about how we will vote won’t work for everyone, because Defenders of the Status Quo harass anyone who won’t keep their team in power. If that would be a problem for you, there is a democratic safeguard in place to protect your right to vote for what you want.
The secret ballot means they will never know how you voted, and you don’t have to tell them!
If all the people who get pressured into voting for what they don’t want, or who have given up on our broken democracy and so have stopped voting, if all the citizens eligible to vote now voted, and voted for what they really wanted, we would have very different election results. The clock is ticking.
So vote for what *you* want.