Anarchism

Elections aren't going to fix everything, not even close. But I think it is an important part of a complete strategy. Getting voters basically comes free with building community and messaging anyway, no reason not to vote a few of your guys into power to run interference on any substantial attempts to crackdown on the main work you are doing.

People who say not to vote are either idiots or conservative trolls wearing masks

Electoralism means more than just voting, its about using elections, representative democracy and the state as means to influence the world. It means using elections and the current goverment as primary focus of your activities.

I rarely meet anarchists that do something like that. Many vote, many dont vote, but really only a few actually embrace electoralism.

I am against in the way, that I dont want to participate in it and dont want to work closely together with groups / people that do.

Against.

I will do it because it’s not a big deal, but I don’t think it’s fixing anything. At best I may get a less worse outcome, which is still not desired.

People that seek power are those that generally should have none. That said, if others are going to force you to be subject to it. There's no reason not to make your voice heard. Working to keep the worst possible candidates from office. All while working to abolish electoralism ultimately.

Against, but I'm more against debating it, especially in anarchist spaces. As of writing this it hasn't exploded into arguments here, but debates on electoralism have a habit of reactivating liberal tendencies, in particular the notion that the system has a chance of saving you, and the emotional baggage that liberalism drills into our heads about how the current election is the most important thing ever and you're a monster for not giving the system your time and attention.

Not an anarchist, but interested in voting theory and alethiology.

Let's start with alethiology (theory of truth), and work our way up. Truth is consistency. A true statement is a statement that is consistent with some standard of truth. Typically there are four standards of Truth: Coherence, Correspondence, Consensus, and Authority. Coherence is internal consistency -- basically math. Correspondence is consistency with the physical world. Coherence and Correspondence are what we'd call Natural Truths. Put them together and you get mathematical relations of physical measurements -- i.e. Science. When you start combining natural truths with limited information, perspectives, and a little bit of game theory two Social Truths emerge: Consensus and Authority. Consensus is consistency between people. Authority is consistency with respect to specific people. It's really important to understand that Consensus and Authority are emergent properties -- i.e. vague descriptions we use for complex systems, not specifically defined measurements. This is where voting theory comes in because people disagree quite passionately about how to make specifically defined measurements anyway. Who has authority? How consensus 'ought' be measured? There isn't a correct answer, but you can define what measurement you're going to use.

An election is a way of measuring a consensus of authorities: i.e. do the relevant people agree? Elections can implement lots of little rules to bias results one way or another, but they're not inherently good or bad. They're just systems. That said, in epistemology there's a definition of knowledge as justified true belief -- basically asserting there has to be a justification (evidence or reasoning) that is true (consistent with the relevant standard(s) of truth, and often preceding knowledge/evidence) and genuinely believed (you can't be lying to our faces). So if we want to know something we can look at the justification and see if it's consistent with whatever standards we think are relevant. We can look at the consistency between the claims of what elections are supposed to do (social truths), how the systems bias the results (coherence), and what the real world results are (correspondence).

Most governments claim to be "democracies" to claim they have the consent of the governed and point to the use of elections as evidence of that consent. The claim of "consent of the governed" is requires social standards of truth, but again social standards are emergent so we look a both coherence and correspondence. The justification is elections, that's a purely a system - i.e. math and coherence, so there's an argument to be made that might already be an insufficient justification on its own, but let's give them the benefit and at least judge it. So, I'll give my best attempts at turning the way elections work with some vague sense logical relations and in-our-heads models -- you're free to model these systems in your own way disagree with what I think are inconsistencies. You're also free to break out a calculator and code do more formal modeling like they do in voting theory.

First inconsistency, elections are supposed to give governments the consent of the governed: i.e. authority derived from consensus. So, if someone is not apart of the consensus (not merely out voted or choosing not to vote, but not allowed to vote), then the is no authority to derive. This is problematic when considering felons, non-naturalized migrants, and tourists. Perhaps you can argue those entering a territory give implicit consent to be governed, but this gets increasingly problematic as time passes if you assume any decay of consent can occur.

Second inconsistency, elections are supposed to give governments the consent of the governed: i.e. authority derived from consensus. But, can consent be given if the consenting party cannot say no? i.e. is the derivation of authority valid? Most elections do not come with a lottery or 'none' option which might be a viable stand in for 'no'. Similarly, does coerced consent count as legitimate consent? If the voting system corrupts the votes in such a way that "strategic"/ coerced voting skews the results, is the election legitimate? Elections don't necessarily have to do this. I've made a go at designing a Ranked Lottery system that gives a lottery option without skewing the vote, but I've never seen another election system that didn't do this.

Third Inconsistency, elections are supposed to give governments the consent of the governed: i.e. authority derived from consensus. Who exactly is the government? How much authority can administrative positions be given by an elected body before they become unelected and illegitimate bureaucrats? Typically, I'd find this argument a bit weak; however, it's worth noting that both the president and the supreme court are not directly elected. They are in-fact appointed by consensus of congress. Given the current times, it might be worth asking when this allocation of authority becomes illegitimate.

I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired of writing and I think you get the general reasoning.

Eh, not really.

Really depends on for what purpose and what are the means of control afterwards. Overall against it, but not purist about it.

I only started voting because of the facists.

I'd be more about elections if you could give both a positive vote and a negative vote, right now it feels like just fighting against fascism and slowly losing (I'm not from USA so not talking about your oranges). I used to not vote when I was younger, because I was protesting against the system. I still am, but now I don't have the luxury of not voting since if people like me won't, the fascists will win.

Anyway, now terrible people get in power by being terrible, lying, and getting morons to vote for them; if they'd gain negative backlash votes that would nullify that shit, it would immediately make it harder for flashy candidates to get elected. Our political system here would support this especially well, since in Finland the votes pool for the whole party - if even one populist would get a huge number of negative votes, it could even tank the whole party .
Of course this would go both ways, but cutting most of the populists away wouldn't be a bad thing. You wouldn't get only boring candidates elected either, because nobody would know about them. So ideally the people who vote for local candidates that walk around and actually talk to people would win, and here a lot of the smaller parties would have more chances to get in power and things wouldn't be stagnant like they are now (in a bad way).

Of course that wouldn't be without flaws, but it would be nice to try somewhere to see what would happen. But it won't, since it would cut the terrible people from power and they want the status quo everywhere

I will always blame the polititians and who treat them like cult leaders. I don't have problem with people who vote and people who don't. If politicians abandonned certsin people, tbose people can't be blamed for not voting

Pro, but in a much more direct fashion that exists currently. I do believe that not participating in elections leads to worse outcomes, and that unless you want to have a bloody revolution , which I and the overwhelming majority of people do not want, then democracy is really the only path forward.

This is more of a “I haven't read theory enough ” kind of post.

The neolibs showing up uninvited the last few threads did so because they are ready to kill the last few anarchists left.

Against.

To be quite honest, after going through an entire year of being gaslit that there wasn't a genocide occurring... yeah I'm not going to vote anymore.