The fundamental tenet of a working democracy is voting. Everyone should have a vote and everyone should exercise their right to vote. To that end we have been seeing posts attempting to shame/mock or otherwise influence people not to vote. While this is a meme community, the idea that people shouldn’t vote goes against the fundamentals of a democracy by the people and for the people. To that end, we are adding a new rule that disallows posts that discourage or shame people from voting. This doesn’t mean that you can’t address how people vote, but even those who don’t agree with you and your political views should still vote. We all should. Everyone. Part of the reason we are in the mess we are in now is because participation in democracy is abysmal. Posts discouraging people from voting are essentially propaganda and will be removed.

PoliticalMemes is a community for having fun at the expense of our political hellscape we find ourselves in. People not voting is a big part of why.

We are taking feedback on this change, please let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments and why.

  • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Not voting is a vote of no confidence.

    similar deliberative body indicate that they no longer support a leader, government,etc.

    Voting is a choice. Not voting is a choice. If you take away the choice of not voting, while only allowing two candidates that a vast majority of Americans don’t want, then can you really call it a democracy?

    If voting is important to you, then it would serve the community better if the suggestion of not voting was discussed and denounced in the community itself. That is the purpose of social forums, to discuss ideas.

    A forum is a public meeting place for open discussions. This rule is the policing of thought, and the antithesis of a forum.

    • Elle@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If voting is important to you, then it would serve the community better if the suggestion of not voting was discussed and denounced in the community itself.

      …It would be kind of interesting if the amount of people voting plummeted so much so that it removed almost any sense of considering the results legitimate and representative of the populace whatsoever. So far as I’m aware I don’t know of any democracies that have a sort of minimal threshold explicitly set to account for and address such a situation…They all seem to presume sufficient civic participation and confidence in their institutions that their citizens wouldn’t simply not participate/vote en masse.

      I think part of the reasoning for that being that if things have gotten that bad, surely the citizenry wouldn’t simply not vote, they’d actively be overthrowing the institutions they had lost confidence in.

        • Pan_Ziemniak@midwest.social
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          9 months ago

          Got this account tagged as “russian shill”

          Its incredible how often this one turns up whenever voting comes up to let us all know its uselss and not to do it. Almost like itd benefit them if you didnt.

          • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            How do you tag an account? That would be useful.

            Yes, we Russians are very concerned about the less than 20,000 users on Lemmy World.

            I have never said not to vote. It is statistically useless though. We’d be better off donating to causes and charities. Which is another reason why this rule is inane.

            • Pan_Ziemniak@midwest.social
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              9 months ago

              Voting is how Portugal enacted a sensible drug policy, gutting the institutions that were created and shouldering the financial burden on charities and 3rd party benefactors is how the program was turned to useless mush. The constant regurgitation of “im not against it, i just think its useless/dishonest/etc.” works better at putting ppl off from voting than outright saying so would.

              Tags are placed in the users profile. And given that leftist spaces on reddit were infiltrated first, im not surprised the troll farms are going after the competitors that the most resolute members that refuse to parrot the krem’s BS would go to next.

              • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Portugal is not America. The science is in the articles I linked. Political Scientists Adam Dynes and John Holbein did the math. I didn’t make reality, I just relay it. Ignore it if you want.

                Edit: Wait. Your account is 6 days old and you’ve already decided I’m a Russian shill? Cyka Blyat! You’ve found me out. Now I’m required to inform you that I am indeed a Russian shill as decided in the IRC Troll Treaty of 2006.

                • Sybil@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  i installed every open source android client. none support it. BUT

                  if you use mastodon, you can add tags there. but i don’t know any mastodon clients that let you log into a lemmy instance, so you would need a mastodon account too.