Why don’t more people vote independent?

29 comments

1. Echo chambers

2. People don’t like to think for themselves

3. The Senate and the Electoral College make having a credible third party in the US really unlikely and at the end of the day, even if no candidate shares every one of your beliefs, there’s probably one you agree with more on the important ones.

4. Even if independent became the majority, it would just become another party, fraught with all of the same corruption and disappointing factionalize ation as the two major US parties. Plus, there’s the legitimate concern about just throwing your vote away. It’s not the way it should be. But most people would rather make a choice that has even the most marginal of impact for their personal politics and use their vote to counter the opposition party.

5. At least in America, voting 3rd party is essentially throwing your vote away.

   Gotta bet on a pony that has a shot at winning the race.

6. Probably the fact that the two main parties will pull away no matter the vote. I vote for whoever’s policy I agree with and don’t consider myself associated with any party. Anytime someone asks and I mention something I always get the “Oh so you’re throwing away your vote, gotcha” response, which I hate.

7. Votes are won by marketing, and although money doesn’t make good marketing, it certainly makes a big difference. Consider too that some portion of major party marketing goes against third parties. Remember “what is Aleppo?” That guy got hit hard.

8. When you live in a house with people that only eat fish or chicken, you pretty much know what you’re having for dinner tonight. Maybe you can stomach chicken a bit more than fish. But if you vote for pizza when you know you’re not getting it, you deserve your salmon filet.

9. The two parties have a monopoly on the system, so voting third party usually means splitting the votes of one of the parties, so the other party wins. You need enough votes for a third party to overcome the number of votes both republicans and democrats get to win the presidency. Third parties have a better chance in local elections. Until there is a viable third party that actually can get the votes needed to beat both Dems and repubs we’re stuck with the two party system. You can say “well the vote starts with you”, I’m more of the mind frame that slow and steady wins the game, and will vote for the party that aligns more with what I want than vote for the candidate that has no chance of winning. If we keep voting for candidates that lean in our direction we’ll get where we need to go eventually. The problem is, is our electoral voting system that allows the candidate that gets less votes to win. And then we get voter suppression, gerrymandering and dumbfucks talking about stolen elections. The system is broken beyond just who we vote for. We need to be persistent.

10. The reason third parties don’t win is because people don’t vote for them because the two major parties have controlled the rhetoric around voting for a third party. “They can’t win,” or “It’s throwing your vote away,” or “The other team’s guy is really bad and might win if you vote for anyone other than our guy,” and stuff like that is all ways to convince you that the only way you can win is by voting for them.

    You want a viable third party? You want a third party to win an election? You actually have to go vote third party. I go through this on social media every four years. People complain about not having a viable third party, but when it comes time to vote, they punch D or R on their ballot because they don’t want the “bad guys” to win.

    But it’s beyond just the Presidency. A third party has to be a legitimate contender for congressional seats too. Without that, it’s a one off accident.

11. I’m in Canada, and our last election was like this last time. We had zero good options, so people were just voting against the ones they hated the most. If you voted for one of the small guys, you felt like your vote could have been better used getting the other guy out.

12. In my home state of Texas, the Libertarian party platform is pro-abortion and open borders. I can’t in good conscience vote for that.

13. I’m not convinced its always a lack of understanding. I’d suggest that a lot is down to independents not having a broad enough and strong enough set of cohesive policies, nor do they have the strength in numbers. Its then seen as best to go with the ‘lesser of the 2 evils’, however you perceive that to be, and its therefore a perpetual problem.

14. Because we’re waaaaaaaay too divided.

15. Because most places don’t use rank choice voting. And implementing rank choice voting would be a detriment to the current political parties, in USA, so they have zero inventive to put it in place.

16. Because the independent never has a shot at winning.

    Its a funny thing. Its only true because people believe it.

17. Because a huge number of people, ime, aren’t voting FOR a candidate. They’re voting AGAINST a candidate.

    If your goal is for a specific person not to win the only valid vote is their most popular and well known opposition, any other choice just splits the opposition vote.

    That decision making process basically enforces a duopoly.

18. Ever since Ross Perot both political parties established a rule that a third party needs so much % of the vote to be included on presidential debates. Without exposure most people won’t vote for them.

    Even though 40% of Americans identify themselves as independent.

19. If you can’t beat them, join them

20. Australia very recently had a Federal election (technically it’s still ongoing, with 3 of 151 seats in doubt and the recount yet to be started) that returned our greatest ever number of independent members.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/results?filter=all&sort=az&state=all

    So, some background: Australia uses a ranked-choice preferential voting system. You don’t vote for a person, you vote for *everybody* in the order in which you like them. Sometimes this means you start at the bottom with the person you hate the most and work up. This means that no votes are “wasted”, because if your number 1 pick gets eliminated, your vote is now counted towards your number 2 pick and so on until you vote for one of the two final candidates. This makes smaller parties much more effective in Australia than in America, and they can even be a political force without getting any seats by forcing major parties to adopt some of their policies in order to get those preference flows.

    Now, the parties. Australia’s “Two-Party” system is between the Coalition and Labor. The Coalition is actually two parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, who have a long term power sharing deal because neither individually can challenge Labor. Labor grew out of the Union movements, Liberals are a typical Pro-Business party and Nationals represent Farmers and Miners in Australia’s regional and remote areas.

    But as you can see if you follow the ABC link, that went to shit this time.

    So, the Coalition did practically everything wrong that they could over the last 3 years. Poor handling of Covid, poor handling of other natural disasters, repeatedly caught being corrupt, terrible handling of a series of rape accusations within parliament, etc. However, the Coalition is supported by Rupert Murdoch and so gets lots of free political advertising across his collection of newspapers and tv stations. In contrast, Labor ran a very small-target strategy with the idea that if they didn’t give Murdoch anything to attack, they could keep most of the focus on the repeated Liberal errors. It worked, a bit too well. Enter the independents.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/results/party-totals

    So this graph has the 5 biggest groups (I wish it would split the Nationals vote from the Liberals, but that’s gotten very confusing recently because of Queensland) and you can see that there are massive voting groups outside of the major two. The Greens are one of the standouts at this election, having a generally increasing vote from younger voters and climate conscious others. This election their primary vote (with an excellent ground game) got them within striking distance of a whole collection of inner-city seats, which they then took on preference flows from Labor. When Greens drop out of a seat, their preferences also flow majorly to Labor. However, there’s another group who won massively this election, and that’s a brand new voting block in Australia who doesn’t have a party yet, but is generally referred to as the Teals. They’re all women and campaigned on being for everything the Liberals are for (economy and deregulation and business) except for the misogyny, corruption and environmental destruction. They did incredibly well, taking seats off the Liberals everywhere they challenged and leading to the first examples of tactical voting in my knowledge of Australian elections. Also voted in as independents are a couple of returning members like Bob Katter, who enters his tenth term as representative of his region.

    The United Australia Party and One Nation are our major Right-Wing-Nutjob parties. I’m not sure what the UAP actually believes in, but One Nation is where the racists go. They usually pick up a Senate seat or two, but have never been a serious challenger for a House of Representatives seat.

    The end result is that we have an expected bare majority Labor government, a Liberal party basically fractured and a cross-bench of independents so large that they are both massively powerful and mostly useless. Labor only needs one or two of them to support any of it’s legislation to pass, so if the Greens don’t like it they’ll just go to the Teals, or to Katter, or to one of the other randoms that got on the bench.

    That said, this election was the breaking of the dam. The major parties can no longer rely on getting a majority government and only having to deal with each other. The independents have shown that local campaigns can win seats and targeted electioneering can result in holding power. There’s a serious mandate for a review of both Australia’s media laws and corruption controls, which if it happens will hamstring the Coalition who rely on Murdoch’s media control to get elected, and on corruption to make money for themselves. A powerful enough corruption investigation will likely lead to charges against many of the Coalition’s sitting members which would in fact be the best thing for them as a party.

    There’s two up and coming Left Wing parties as well, who with future advertising and ground work could come to challenge the Greens for Senate seats. They are Fusion and Reason. One is the combination of a group of science-focused parties that had to band together to get past the new membership rules, the other is the renaming of the old Sex Party.

21. Because you vote for the lesser of two evils. Until we have a different election system a 3rd party vote might help the candidate you like the least to win.

22. Because in a first past the post system, voting for the party you hate the least with the biggest chance to win is the way to go.

23. because the stupid electoral college makes a vote for a 3rd party, irrelevant.

24. With the political structure of the US, a third party vote ia like throwing out your vote.

25. because you have to both have no preference for who is elected and still want to vote but basically everyone that has no preference has no preference because of of apathy.

    anything else is a detriment to your actual beliefs as you are tacitly taking votes away from the party you hate less giving the party you hate more a better chance of winning

26. Republicans always back their candidate. Democrats usual split their vote and end up losing and then act shocked. Or dems are to lazy to go out and vote (midterms)

27. You mean in the US?

    Because counting to three is difficult, I suppose? Seriously, with those guys everything gets reduced down to two, equally shit options.

28. because they ideologically agree with a side and their respective policies. It’s that simple.

    Just because you think you have some enlightened understanding of the nuances of each political party doesn’t mean you’re correct or that other people agree. Why would you assume somebody doesn’t “really understand” a party’s policies when in reality they likely do understand and agree?

29. People have been convinced that voting for non standard politicians is a bad thing, because the politicians from the main parties have been doing suuuuuch a good jooooooob.