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- cross-posted to:
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Patrick Breyer, a staunch defender of digital rights, laments the Pirate Party’s exit from the EU Parliament as a blow to online privacy.
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Well, shit, there goes my vote.
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.
I would have voted for the Pirate Party if there was a ballot for them.
Didn’t print it beforehand so I couldn’t.
Last time I printed my own ballot they just didn’t count it and my vote was considered invalid. Even though I had the exact size required by regulations…
Wait, am I missing something here? Are there countries where you don’t have all options on the ballot, or at least an empty space?
Edit: Saw your explanation in another comment. Wouldn’t having to bring your own ballot also invalidate voting secrecy, since bringing your own indicates that you most likely intent to vote for an unlisted party (and, in reverse, anyone using the regular ballot voting for a party that’s listed)?
It affects secrecy a bit but you still have to take at least two different ballots into the voting booth. Obviously you are bringing your own ballot and taking one already printed so it’s not really a secret.
Also there was taped garbage bags in the voting booth so that people can throw away their discarded ballots but that’s also a great way to show what every else has been voting before me…
I still think our voting system is quite ok but there are definitely flaws.
Concerning your edit, not sure about other countries, but I can speak about the process in France.
We get (normally) ballots with the programs in the mail before the elections, so we can also bring ballots from there. Then the way it works when voting is
- there’s a table with ballots from all lists that provided them (so missing the ones we’re talking about here) and you can take any number of them
- then you go isolate in a cabin where you put the ballot you want, or nothing, inside an envelope
- finally your identity is verified, your vote is counted and you put your envelope in a transparent box
So there’s not really a way to definitely know you’re voting for an unlisted candidate here.
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.
Thanks for being part of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.
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.
Yeah, this is one of the seasons the Pirate party is pushing for a unique ballot, because the current format is really unfavorable towards small parties that don’t have the means to print the ballots among other things
Eh, I’d much rather vote for a party that aligns with my values but might not get a seat, in hopes it will inspire more people to do so next time around.
Vote your conscience while you can. I’m pretty much stuck voting for slightly left of center candidates (in the US) because the opposition is to the right of Kim Jong Un depending on the issue.
I still voted for them, because I could.
And I’m sick of the useful vote thing, I did it last time in 2022 against Le Pen and all I got was a lousy President.
Better a lousy president than a fascist, hell, boring politicians is what we should aim for!
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No she isn’t? Macron is president until the next French presidential election in 2027.
Prolly their confusion is that Macron called for new elections, but unlike some parliamentary governments Macron isn’t selected by parliament.
Don’t expect a Le Pencil supporter to understand reason.
I am not a supporter, I just find very stupid to postpone the inevitable while proposing… nothing better?
I mean yes, Macron was dumb on this one, but he isn’t as dumb as that
Yes, I misunderstood how the system works in France.
Strategic voting is what you’re stuck doing depending on your local electoral process.
She’s going to become president in 2024, she could have become president in 2022 instead.
If a party won’t fix the serious issue to let me also vote for who I want, they’re not entitled to my vote.
You can deny the reality of the electoral system you’re stuck with all you want, at the end of the day you’re probably one of the people that will end up suffering the most because of it.
Voting for a party I don’t want is also suffering, though I doubt you’d believe that. Keeping the main parties in power via a rigged system ain’t ending this catch 22 cycle.
both macron and lepen are two corrupted fascists tricking you like a chicken into choosing a side and voting for them instead of “wasting your vote”
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.
Same… I hate having to vote useful
I wanted to vote for them, I did so last time, but they didn’t appear on the ballot in my country this time. Couldn’t vote for them…
I have voted PP since their conception, and I think we have them to thank for a lot. Will continue to do so, probably forever. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get more attention these days. Tech related privacy, anti monopoly, ai safety etc is just a part but they have excellent values in other areas as well.
I don’t understand how these issues don’t get more attention these days
Who owns the media?
The rothschilds
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?
Rothschilds are diamonds and other crap,
It’s the Australian Rupert Murdoch
Although him and a Lord Rothschild have been involved in some fuckery with oil in Israel
I think the correct answer is some billionaire
Yeah it could be the billionaire family that runs everything. Maybe it’s them.
Or it could be something else like aliens I guess?
Great now I need my tinfoil hat
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I wish I could actually vote for the pirate party. But I can’t here. Didn’t show up in the election list. They were 2 or elections ago
I voted for them. Judging by the numbers, there must have been about three of us.
Sounds like you’re the new candidate.
I would have considered voting for them, except there was no list with their name where I live
I managed to convince my brother and a friend of mine to vote for them. This is really disappointing. Over half the votes in Germany were for right-wing parties this time, over 16% were for the right-wing-extremist party AFD. Germany really wants history to repeat itself ig.
But at least France is holding its hand this time! 🙃
Does the average voter just not care at all about anything actually important? What is even going on here?
More and more the average voter earns minimum wage, has to pay increasing rent, increasing food prices, has shit education, degrading public healthcare, etc… last thing on their mind is voting and when they do they follow what the (not independent at all) media feeds down their throats.
We just had a vote for government officials along the EP vote. Less than 60% turned up which means the most common vote was a vote for nothing. The average voter doesn’t care.
At least voters who don’t turn up are harmless. If all the people who voted for EPP-affiliated parties just didn’t turn up instead, we’d face far fewer problems.
What a load of bullshit, Voters that don’t turn up are the most dangerous of them all, because it lowers the percentage and skews the votes. If 40% go voting and make their vote invalid, those 40% still get counted, meaning the percentage for other parties is overall lower.
Brexit in the UK happened because most didn’t vote, meaning a small percentage of voters had over-inflated influence.
Quick reminder that in a liberal democracy, social movements are more important for progressive change than electoralism.
Join a union. Be it trade union, housing union, or whatever (or even any affinity group). And get active.
Complaining about election results achieves nothing, but sow despair.
“Progressive” change will only take you further away from liberal democracy and free society.
surpassing liberal democracy is a good thing. I disagree with the free society bit. What definition of “free society” are you referring to?
I’d argue that a progressive country like Denmark with its universal healthcare and universally available college-level education is substantially more free than a freedom-touting country like the United States that limits access to these basics to those with substantial resources.
Also: voting is important because it lets you choose your enemy. Progressive liberals and social democrats won’t fight against you as hard as conservatives and fascists.
Putting this here because some people might read this and think “Voting doesn’t matter.”
Voting doesn’t really matter, though.
Edit, clarification: at least compared to bottom-up social movements.
If it doesn’t matter, why are so many people afraid when the right wing parties take control? If it’s not important why are people so concerned about the supreme Court? Why are women so scared of anti abortion legislation? You vote the legislative and they can simply take the power away from your social movements. So in the end, it does matter.
Voting should not be the main strategy to fight for liberty and progressive change, since the cards in electoralism are way too stacked in favour of the already powerful minority. That’s what I meant with “voting is not important”.
When Trump lost the last election, MAGA-heads were ready to take up arms against what they considered an injustice. Why aren’t progressives ready to do so? How does the “vote blue no matter who” crowd prepare against another Jan 6th situation?
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The US supreme court isn’t even a democratically legitimized body. Why do you want to take the high road if reactionaries clearly don’t care for the rules?
Go to your local library and read a book. Any book.
“Hey guys, plowing this field won’t feed you, we should just gather.”
It absolutely does though. You can’t elect worker ownership of the means of production but you sure can elect anything from fascists to social democrats. I for one don’t want fascists to control my government
If progressive policies were ever put into place by an elected body, it was always merely a by-product of already established social consensus formed by bottom-up politics.
I fully agree. But people get better things. Not voting means they don’t. Not voting means the people who want worse things get what they want
With electoralism, people get complacent with watered down reforms and become politically alienated.
But media controls people
Sad times.
I voted for him. Sad to see him leave. It doesn’t seem like we have many advocates for digital privacy in the parliament.
e: typo
Die Linke voted similarly on many issues to the Pirate Party.
Fuck, this is seriously bad news
I always expected us to never address our ecological destruction or climate change in any meaningful way, and instead devolve into some techno-feudalist, fascist dystopia before the civilisation collapses into a death spiral… But man… I’ve never wanted to be wrong more in my entire life.
Watching the EU regress in unison, back down the auth path, is not how I expected it would go down.
“Cyberpunk was a warning, not an aspiration.” – Mike Pondsmith
Kinda alarmist tone.
I always expected for the irrational opinion of people in many Western countries that they can get anything by voting for it to meet the hard cold reality, but it never was anything like “end of the world”.
I’m hopeful. A certain kind of evil people have felt their power and are slowly becoming complacent, which means that the European societies will get a shot at getting rid of them, for the time being. And then there will be a dawn after this sunset.
Though that “allowing the snake to raise its head” thing should be done carefully, so that you’d still be alive when the opportunity to crush that head arises.
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God fucking damn it
What did the pirate party stand for? I heard of them before, but not much what they stand for other than digital privacy.
I think this election was mainly focused on Migration, economy and green deal. Mainly why the right took over and the green and left lost. People are seeing the negative effect of migration more and more, and diplomats cannot hide it anymore.
Democracy. Real direct democracy, not the representative bullshit. But with the little influence we got, we can’t do much better than trying to protect digital privacy right now
Outside of their obvious platform, pirate parties tend to be social democratic, like centre-centre left AFAIK. With more of an emphasis on direct democracy and anti-authoritarianism than bigger mainstream parties.
