Patrick Breyer, a staunch defender of digital rights, laments the Pirate Party’s exit from the EU Parliament as a blow to online privacy.
Patrick Breyer, a staunch defender of digital rights, laments the Pirate Party’s exit from the EU Parliament as a blow to online privacy.
I was considering voting for the pirate party, but they polled at less than 5% in France and it was not a useful vote, which was evidently needed.
Yeah, the greens had a risk of not getting 5% so it was much more worthwhile to vote for them.
You should be able to vote for both… 😮💨
There may be even better voting systems but 3-2-1 would be a nice change. This way strategic voting gets at least somewhat mitigated and might force people to actually invest some time and look at the agenda of some other parties too because they have to vote for 3 parties.
There are voting systems that completely prevent the need for tactical voting (e.g. instant-runoff voting, aka alternative vote) but if the system still trends towards having two main parties then not much has really changed.
A bigger issue is that a single candidate/party is not very good at representing an area in comparison to having more (3, 5, ideally more). If people vote 80% A and 20% B and A gets the single candidate then 20% are misrepresented. With 5 candidates then that could be split 4 to A and 1 to B, a perfect representation.
You trust polls?
And I was right to; pirate party got less than 1% of votes, also due to the fact they couldn’t afford to have their voting paper in most places.
Polls are problematic in that they reinforce their own predictions. It’s especially frustrating in recent years when you’re bombarded with them even when there’s no election in sight. Problem is, governing parties are usually busy governing while populists are campaigning 24/7. Media has made a huge effort to reinforce the trend and get people used to living in a far right era. Polls are unhelpful and destort democracy to a dangerous degree.
Where do you live that you can print your own ballot?
France. The parties have to pay the government if they want their ballot already present at the election place. As a citizen, you may also bring any ballot you want (within some very reasonable rules), so the smaller parties instruct you to print your own to save on costs.
OMG. Here in Germany you sometimes get an entire booklet of ballot papers, if necessary. You wouldn’t even be allowed to bring your own ballot. Otherwise, one could secretly mark their own ballot in some way, thereby undermining the secrecy of the vote.