Voting

This will be a short one. There's this one quote I thought about a lot when reading news about the 2024 US Presidential Elections, and it's this one:

Remember, there are no reluctant votes or hesitant votes or compromising votes or votes with asterisks next to them. There are only votes.

I like this quote a lot, and I wish more people thought about it as they go vote in elections, especially this cycle of elections (2024).

Disclaimers

You can go seek the original source of this quote but I don't want to explicitly disclose it. I want to make it perfectly clear that I don't endorse the original source, nor explicitly disagree with the original source. I neither endorse nor disavow the source article, and the person that wrote said article. This is because I try not to explicitly state my political opinions and leanings in public, and I will try not to do that on this blog unless I feel very strongly about it.

To clear up another possible misunderstanding, I think this quote should not be construed as an endorsement of voting for a third-party candidate in a system that favors a two-party arrangement. I think the Spoiler Effect is very real, and you should always vote for the lesser of two evils in such a system. Even in such a scenario, if you re-read this quote, you might notice that it applies to you as well. There are no votes with asterisks that allow that vote to be transferred to another party in case your candidate loses (unless your voting system allows for runoff voting). In a multi-party system that allows for coalitions, it makes sense to vote for a smaller party.