1
What is tactical voting - and why could it be a powerful tool? | Decomplicated
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
UK Politics
3089 readers
63 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tactical voting ensures that new parties never have a chance to achieve success. They're the epitome of giving up on democracy.
That statement is true and explains why we should support replacing FPTP, but doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote tactically. Hating the system is reasonable, but playing the system is necessary whilst it’s in place. Otherwise you’re just weakening support for replacing it.
Note that I don’t mean tactical voting is always the best option, just that it’s not a tool you should discard entirely, at some point your tactical vote could get FPTP replaced, so don’t be too uncompromising.
It's a method of maximising utility from your vote within a given system. In our system, every vote except the minimum necessary for the winner to win does nothing other than signal support for a given platform. You have to weigh up whether that signal is worth more than the gains from getting your preference of your two local big candidates to win. One of those decisions is much more likely to make an impact, but it's making an impact that's less aligned with my actual preferences.
Another issue is that there's not really any way to stop your political opponents from doing it, and if they do then they have a huge advantage over every other party that is more fractured. They're making that sacrifice of voting for someone less aligned and in exchange they're getting that candidate to win every time with 30% of the votes, because the rest of the electorate is split ten ways.
But who can argue with arguments such as Fuck the Tories?