It’s bad, especially in the US and Canada, but not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one, even if the systems are set up to look that way. Voting is always worth it.
Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one
There might not be rules explicitly for this purpose, but the Electoral College and Senate are hard-coded institutions in the US government that effectively guarantee this. The antagonism there is more framed as a rural vs urban one, but it effectively amounts to the same thing in practice. Going by Wikipedia numbers, every elector for NY represents the votes of up to 714,372 residents of New York, while in Wyoming, that ration is considerably lower, at 1 elector for every 196,251 residents. This ignores things like residents counted in the population who are ineligible to vote and people who just don’t, but you get the point. Ditto for the Senate, where some 10 million New Yorkers get the same representation as just under 300,000 people in Wyoming.
Yes, rural states could eventually swing left again and make this no longer the case, but it certainly seems unlikely at any time in the near future.
Right, so you removed the reat of the sentence in that quote which agreed with that.
Specifically what I’m saying is that if people smarten up the system will change. The US is super close to being a dictatorship but the world saw Mamdani get elected all the same. There was a lot of power trying to get him to lose and he still won because he got the votes.
If people can vote and don’t because “it doesn’t matter” then they are a huge part of the problem and should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they lose for a few cycles, that support is crucially important to see on paper.
It’s bad, especially in the US and Canada, but not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one, even if the systems are set up to look that way. Voting is always worth it.
There might not be rules explicitly for this purpose, but the Electoral College and Senate are hard-coded institutions in the US government that effectively guarantee this. The antagonism there is more framed as a rural vs urban one, but it effectively amounts to the same thing in practice. Going by Wikipedia numbers, every elector for NY represents the votes of up to 714,372 residents of New York, while in Wyoming, that ration is considerably lower, at 1 elector for every 196,251 residents. This ignores things like residents counted in the population who are ineligible to vote and people who just don’t, but you get the point. Ditto for the Senate, where some 10 million New Yorkers get the same representation as just under 300,000 people in Wyoming.
Yes, rural states could eventually swing left again and make this no longer the case, but it certainly seems unlikely at any time in the near future.
Right, so you removed the reat of the sentence in that quote which agreed with that.
Specifically what I’m saying is that if people smarten up the system will change. The US is super close to being a dictatorship but the world saw Mamdani get elected all the same. There was a lot of power trying to get him to lose and he still won because he got the votes.
If people can vote and don’t because “it doesn’t matter” then they are a huge part of the problem and should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they lose for a few cycles, that support is crucially important to see on paper.