Your vote actually has an effect in the world - a very tiny one, but one that (in connection with everyone else's votes) determines the outcome of an election.

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Reminds me of an old bit by Jake Johannsen.

I like to vote. I like going into the voting booth and pulling those levers and stuff. Only sometimes, I'm not sure my machine is hooked up to anything. Sometimes I'll pull the lever for something like "healthcare" and something like "flag burning amendment" comes out.

A grown adult living in a country with an indirect, republican form of government that is further artificially constrained to a two-party scheme of positioning alternatives who thinks that their vote has no effect if a) the choices PRESENTED aren't 100% to their liking and b) the choice THEY MAKE doesn't win has a dangerously superficial understanding of how government works. They are essentially voting within a four-square or nine-square checker model and the actual game being played is three-dimensional 8x8x8 chess played over decades.

Living in a functional democracy does not consist of solely voting FOR policies and FOR politicians who CLAIM to want to pull the cart DIRECTLY in the vector you favor. In a diverse society with diverse (and often corrupted) thinking, the system isn't only going to produce POSITIVE choices. The voter will OFTEN be required to evaluate NEGATIVE options and look at the entire system and make choices that may not reflect their preferred, immediate goal of moving five miles east/northeast but instead thwart efforts by another party or candidate to move the country one hundred miles DUE SOUTH.


WTH