There’s an election in the United States this November. I’m sure you’ve heard. With it, all kinds of bots masquerading as people, and people masquerading as empathetic, have landed on social media, to share gutless ‘wisdom’ like a repeal of the 19th Amendment, roughly 100 years after the suffragettes marched and died for women to not only be allowed to vote, but to legally be considered a person here in Canada.
What really got me was this:
Wooooow… just. Wow. What?
Ladies, Gents, Xirs, and everyone in-between, above, and below: please vote. 😳 pic.twitter.com/nNfYVja9XW
— Chrystal Grcevich (@CgrcevichAuthor) September 24, 2020
This RawHoney6, if they’re not a bot, is talking about reversing voting rights back to the 1800s, and in one breath seems to be both condemning the stupidity of First-Past-the-Post voting systems within an electoral college-type set up, while also celebrating it.
But the point is, true democracy lets as many people vote as possible. If you think that too many people get to vote, you’re a broken person.
'All a woman's vote does is just duplicate or nullify her husband's vote' is from a tweet I can't ever unsee.
I'd like to remind 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎𝑜𝓃𝑒 that your vote still counts, unless the fascist dictators in your life invent a reason not to count it.
— Abby (@abbythetweet) September 24, 2020
If your husband/wife, common law spouse, roommate, or parents believe your vote should match theirs so that their vote isn’t cancelled out, then your husband/wife, common law spouse, roommate, or parents believe that their vote is more important than yours. It is not.
They’re behaving like political parties, where the only votes they care about are the ones they count for themselves. And political parties are all pretty undemocratic, ironically.
😂 Bruh, all of everyone's votes either duplicate or nullify the other votes.
Sit down, Socrates.
— Emily Greene (@EmAsInMoney) September 24, 2020
While all kinds of votes are essentially tossed because of the FPTP electoral systems most of us use, the same is true of anyone in your electoral district.
You stand in line to vote for an hour. Joe Schmuck, who thinks guns should be shoes so he can really kick a man when he’s down, votes for all the funny names on the ballot because it’s his god-given right as a male person, and because every choice is different from the researched decisions you made, you both cancelled each other out, unless either of you picked candidates that won.
So, sure, democracy means cancelled out votes, and that’s trash. There are better electoral systems, that the US and Canada are mostly afraid to use beyond the municipal level. However, if you’ve been told how to vote so that someone else’s vote isn’t nullified, don’t do it.
Vote how you want to vote, and focus on changing the electoral system, not elevating the civic rights of one person in your household over another.
