Half of Americans don't vote.

Yep. I enjoy hypothetical discussions about how to fix our shit to benefit humans as much as anybody else.

But that's the wall I mentally run into every time: dozens of millions of people voted for the obvious greater evil THREE consecutive times.

And these weren't some kind of bland Romney v Obama elections that were very much two sides of the same coin. They were random politician v dementia predator Hitler and roughly half of voters were smashing that pedoHitler button.

I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.

Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.

The UK also has 1st-past-the-post voting, yet polling is showing that people are rejecting their 2 big parties: Labour (liberal capitalists) and the Tories (sociopathic capitalists), in favor of Reform (psychotic capitalists) and the Green party (ethical environmentalists).

"It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed." - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13

"Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact." - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01

You know what's even better? Proportional representation and an executive branch that answers directly to your elected parliament.

Ranked choice or STV just means you continue to vote against Republicans and hope for the second worst option of Democrats, but you can feel better about yourself because you put a left-wing party down as your first choice.

STV should only be used for figurehead positions with no real power.

from what I hear, depending on the state, it's not easy to vote in the US.

• In some places you have to reregister beforehand and you don't get a reminder
• sometimes the next place to vote is far away
• you have to bring a lot of papers
• the election is during workhours on like a tuesday
• there is a huge line and it's sometimes really hot out
• even then sometimes they delete you from the list without notifying you

especially in southern states, primarily black neighborhoods districts have extra shitty conditions to prevent black people from voting

You are confusing cause and effect. We have voter apathy because we are where we are. The vote-harder contingent has never once shown that it works. Every single president has presided over mass murder of innocent civilians. Every single party has approved or failed to stop mass murder. There has not been a single victory over racialized mass incarceration in 70 years. The US imprisons more of its people than almost any other country, and has a parole system twice as big as its prison system, meaning it manages the lives 3x more people with its police force than any other country on earth. It's unfathomably larger than anything the world has ever seen. It absolutely dwarfs the height of the GULAG system.

The system creates the apathy. The apathy doesn't create the system.

And I saw your other comment that not-voting won't make things better and that's true, but voting also won't make things better. So it's time to start thinking about what will make things better and time to stop funneling energy into a known ineffective solution.

We have that voter apathy because our voting system is awful, and doesn't allow most votes to even matter. People should still vote, but that alone isn't enough to fix anything. As things are now it's damage control at best.

Problem is in a lot of places those with the D next to their name aren't progressive with the only ones that actually are being third party. So not only do you have to convince a non-voter to vote, but you have to convince them to support someone that's not part of the 2 major parties.

Sure, but at some point ya gotta think, "Maybe I should destroy the de-limbing machine," instead of continuing to put part of your body in there.

(This isn't a criticism of you or your beliefs, just a jokey perspective.)

At some point, you will run out of fingers...

To be fair, that is how primaries work. In many states only people registered with the party can pick who ends up at the binary vote. Which forces people to denigrate themselves by capitulating to a party in order to be allowed to run in their primary and get money.

So you believe that a dictatorship of capital, wielding the power of state violence to suppress its enemies and plan the economy, is better than a stateless, classless, moneyless society? Basically what you're saying is that USSR was the absolute peak of societal development, and while I do like many faucets of USSR I will disagree here.