As Sami Hamdi explained, if enough people vote for Jill Stein and she gets 5%, her campaign qualifies for federal funding and we will have a legit third party on the ticket 2-4 years from now. Is that too long to wait? There is no other choice short of a revolution.
I understand the political stance and potential benefit in vothing for Stein. I have done it and don't criticize anyone who does. I've also become much more cynical about the whole electoral process. I'm especially mistrustful of the proprietary electronic voting machines and software that now dominate the process. I think it allows third-party votes to be part of what I call an "electoral slush fund" that can be moved around at will. Lettists used to be in the forefront of analyzing and criticizing that, but it's another line of critical thought most of them abandoned, because Trump. (Mark Crispin Miller, whom you can find on Substack, is an exception.) Here's an excerpt from my article on this during the 2016 election. Sorry to be such a bummer.
"It’s also important to understand what it means when the voting official in the clip says, “Vendors are driving this process of voting technology in the US.” It is for-profit vendors who provide their proprietary software and technology, their testing procedures, and their assurances, upon which the public and election officials must rely, but to which they have no access. This is another example of the neo-liberal privatization agenda that abandons adequately funding and staffing public agencies to perform vital public services, and instead hands public money to private contractors who do the job their profit-maximizing way. Voting, a core task of democracy, has now been put in the hands of private firms with proprietary technology. This is a direct result of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed after the 2000 election – whose ostensible goal was to rationalize the voting process, but whose actual result was to subsidize the growth of a for-profit election industry over the last fifteen years, creating a voting process that is more opaque and less reliable. Even an American President will tell you: “There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.”
"It is foolish to ignore how this electronic voting system affects what third-party voting might actually accomplish. There’s no more need to stuff ballots when you can invisibly transfer electronic votes. Third-party votes are no longer just brave, if futile, markers of political difference; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 12% to 9%, or (more likely) 5% to 3%, of the vote, and Hillary or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory. Who’s going to notice?"
I’m so sad 😭
As Sami Hamdi explained, if enough people vote for Jill Stein and she gets 5%, her campaign qualifies for federal funding and we will have a legit third party on the ticket 2-4 years from now. Is that too long to wait? There is no other choice short of a revolution.
I understand the political stance and potential benefit in vothing for Stein. I have done it and don't criticize anyone who does. I've also become much more cynical about the whole electoral process. I'm especially mistrustful of the proprietary electronic voting machines and software that now dominate the process. I think it allows third-party votes to be part of what I call an "electoral slush fund" that can be moved around at will. Lettists used to be in the forefront of analyzing and criticizing that, but it's another line of critical thought most of them abandoned, because Trump. (Mark Crispin Miller, whom you can find on Substack, is an exception.) Here's an excerpt from my article on this during the 2016 election. Sorry to be such a bummer.
From https://thepolemicist.substack.com/p/strike-vote
"It’s also important to understand what it means when the voting official in the clip says, “Vendors are driving this process of voting technology in the US.” It is for-profit vendors who provide their proprietary software and technology, their testing procedures, and their assurances, upon which the public and election officials must rely, but to which they have no access. This is another example of the neo-liberal privatization agenda that abandons adequately funding and staffing public agencies to perform vital public services, and instead hands public money to private contractors who do the job their profit-maximizing way. Voting, a core task of democracy, has now been put in the hands of private firms with proprietary technology. This is a direct result of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed after the 2000 election – whose ostensible goal was to rationalize the voting process, but whose actual result was to subsidize the growth of a for-profit election industry over the last fifteen years, creating a voting process that is more opaque and less reliable. Even an American President will tell you: “There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.”
"It is foolish to ignore how this electronic voting system affects what third-party voting might actually accomplish. There’s no more need to stuff ballots when you can invisibly transfer electronic votes. Third-party votes are no longer just brave, if futile, markers of political difference; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 12% to 9%, or (more likely) 5% to 3%, of the vote, and Hillary or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory. Who’s going to notice?"