[anu7df]

This is what I do not understand. If you are so troubled by Hilary, then make a stand against her. If you think Trump is worse (I do) then vote against him in a way that counts; vote for Hilary. This is not an election to sit on the sidelines. Make a choice that matters. This is not really directed at you per say, but to Americans who could vote and are expressing this "do not vote/ vote third party" sentiment. I can only guess that they are Trump supporters hoping a three way split helps them.

[thirteenfingers]

Likely third-party voter here:

(1) I suspect every voter has a threshold of evil-ness beyond which they simply can't in good conscience vote for Candidate X, even if Candidate Y is evil-er. For me, we've passed that threshold.

(2) I don't live in a swing state, so my vote already has only symbolic significance. As such I'd rather go on record voting no confidence in either Clinton or Trump, and vote for someone that I think would actually do a reasonable job if by some miracle they became president.

(3) I know Gary Johnson and the other third-party candidates have no chance of winning - _this_ time. I accept that (in my opinion) we're screwed for at least the next four years no matter whether it's Clinton or Trump, but if as many votes as possible go third-party this election, maybe - just maybe - third-parties will gain enough credibility to have a reasonable chance next election, or else the two major parties will finally get the message and pick better candidates.

[Grishnakh]

>or else the two major parties will finally get the message and pick better candidates.

You'd think that after Bill's success in 1992, Gore's failure in 2000, Kerry's failure in 2004, and Obama's success in 2008, the DNC would finally have gotten a clue about how important it is to have a candidate who's well-liked and popular with the younger voters. But apparently not.

>(1) I suspect every voter has a threshold of evil-ness beyond which they simply can't in good conscience vote for Candidate X, even if Candidate Y is evil-er. For me, we've passed that threshold.

This is another really huge factor.

[brainfire]

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

[Aaargh20318]

> This is not an election to sit on the sidelines. Make a choice that matters.

If you tell a kid that it's having green beans for dinner, it will throw a tantrum because it doesn't like green beans. If you ask it: "what do you want for dinner, green beans or spinach?", it will happily choose the beans because it likes spinach even less. The illusion of choice is a very powerful one.

You get to choose from a grand total of 2 pre-vetted candidates. Do you really think it matters which one you pick ?

The purpose of an election is not so the people can choose their leader, it's to make the people think they chose their leader. It prevents revolution.

[humanrebar]

Trump is a lot of things, but pre-vetted isn't one of them.

There was a robust primary season this time around, perhaps the most robust in over a century. The results are hogwash, and we can discuss what happened and what we can do about it. But it's not entirely rigged.

[Aaargh20318]

> Trump is a lot of things, but pre-vetted isn't one of them.

No, the republicans made a mistake by actually letting the people's vote decide and they will correct it before the next elections. The Democrats have already made this kind of mistake in the past[1] which is why they now have superdelegates to correct for that.

So yeah, Trump supporters managed to game the system this one time, unfortunately they wasted their one opportunity by choosing that clown.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate#Origins

[dragonwriter]

Actually, the Democrats aren't the only ones that have something to protect against that: while the Democrats have superdelegates to tip the scale in favor of insiders (though, as yet, the supers have never actually, AFAIK, tipped the result in a different direction than the majority of pledged delegates), they, unlike the Republicans, actually assign pledged delegates in a basically proportionate manner (there are state by state differences, but all of them are fundamentally around a proportionate baseline.)

The Republicans also have a system to prevent a popular outsider from winning, its just a different system. Rather than assigning pledged delegates in a basically proportional manner and then establishing superdelegates as a safety valve, they have designed a system to favor candidates with establishment support by, in most primaries/caucuses, giving vastly disproportionate delegates to the plurality or majority winner (in some cases, winner-take-all), a system designed to favor candidates who start off ahead, which is assumed to be (and usually is) those with the most party pedigree and establishment advance support preparing the ground.

This backfired on the establishment in this election largely because the establishment started out backing a candidate that was so unappealing to their own key supporters that even major donors were bad mouthing him from the beginning of the primary campaign and talking about how they were only giving to him because they felt compelled out of loyalty to the Party and the candidates family, which gave plenty of opportunity for a celebrity candidate to leverage free media to a powerful lead while the establishment was scrambling to adjust, which they never managed to do.

[Grishnakh]

>No, the republicans made a mistake by actually letting the people's vote decide and they will correct it before the next elections. The Democrats have already made this kind of mistake in the past[1] which is why they now have superdelegates to correct for that.

What are you talking about? The superdelegates weren't even a factor in nominating Hillary; she won the popular vote in the DNC primaries even without taking into account the SDs. You can argue that media complicity and other factors like CtR had a big hand here, but in the end, it was the Democratic voters who pulled the lever for her. So just like the Republican voters managed to choose a clown, so did the Democratic voters, except it was even worse for the Dems: on the Rep side, at least they can point out that it was actually a minority of Rep voters who chose him, and he won because of vote-splitting between all the other candidates. This just isn't a case on the Dem side, where all the other candidates aside from Sanders got almost no votes at all, and Hillary won a clear majority.

[Aaargh20318]

> What are you talking about? The superdelegates weren't even a factor in nominating Hillary;

Who's talking about Hillary ? I'm just saying they have a mechanism in place to make sure there is no actual democracy going on. I didn't claim they had to use that mechanism in this election.

[Grishnakh]

They may have a mechanism in place, but your argument falls flat at complaining about this mechanism (or any undemocratic mechanism) when it hasn't even been used to change the final results of any election.

I guess you could say that Democratic voters are a lot better at nominating the person their party leadership wants them to than the Republican voters.

[eveningcoffee]

The solution that forces you to choose between two not acceptable outcomes is a very bad solution. If both choices are not acceptable then there should be a way to reject both of them.

[wu-ikkyu]

"Let's flip a coin, heads I win, tails you lose. You don't like those rules? Too bad, you must play."

[titzer]

Why not vote against both and send a _very_ clear message that both parties, frankly, suck?

[pessimizer]

Sadly IMO, most people think that way, therefore we get to make this exact same choice every 4 years, where we vote for the overtly racist party to defeat the blacks, or the other party to think of ourselves as a friend to the blacks (or because we are the blacks) and ignore the terrible effects of bipartisanship. The only reason this election is interesting is because a critical mass of people are irritated by the two parties in general; normally, this would be a Jeb Bush v. Hillary Clinton election, and Sanders would have dropped out after the first Democratic primary debate.

Of course, if things had been going normally, Hillary Clinton would be serving the end of her second term. The potential energy for change has been building for a while, 9/11, the Iraq debacle, the housing bubble, the rise of the social Internet, the death of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers turning 70 have had a huge effect on how political thought amongst the American masses is distributed.

I'm troubled by both Hillary and Trump. I'm excited by the inevitable outcome that we are going to elect a weak President after a couple of decades of Executive branch expansion. I'm excited to vote for someone other than the two parties to promote ideas that are usually excluded from the public discourse for reasons other than their merits.