| > I'd much rather not have my vote counted then vote for someone I despise. "Hmm, 10% voter turnout. Something must be wrong." Empirically, low turnout as a signal that something is wrong which provokes some kind of change to correct it doesn't work very well. > Encouraging people to vote for a person they don't like just because they don't dislike them quite as much as the other person sets a very bad precedent. Encouraging people to not vote because eventually that will signal that something is wrong and produce positive change is a lot worse. Vote-for-one voting is still a ranked-preference method, its just one with only two ranks, and a restriction that only one candidate can be put in the first rank. It provides some (though often less than you'd like) input into social decisionmaking. Abstention, in any voting system, is simply expressing absolute indifference between the available options -- it doesn't mean that you dislike them all, you could just like them all equally. It provides no useful signal into social decisionmaking. If you are actually indifferent, that's fine, but signaling indifference when what you really want to say is that you are not indifferent, but also not happy with your choices, is probably not what you want. If you don't like the choices you get at general elections, there are ways to signal that that are far more effective than not voting. (The weakest and most basic of which is voting in primary elections or whatever the equivalent is.) |