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.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      4·
      9 months ago

      I think it goes more for people who are uninformed and don’t want to vote anyway, but are forced to make a bad decision off the top of their heads. My country has mandatory voting and I see this happen quite a lot, we have the exact same problems.

      In that sense encouraging someone to vote won’t really matter if their decision is uninformed and can even be detrimental because people do willingly vote for these autocrats when they rightfully see no real option.

      The first step is not voting but to encourage people to be politically engaged not with ideas but their surroundings and immediate material needs, and teach them how they can check in on the powerful. They can be coopted by bad actors all along this journey too.

      Discouraging someone to vote, though? Eh, by all means vote if you want but I don’t think voting really works that much at all because the system is completely broken in most places, and I will always point this out. If that counts as discouraging then here I am.

      I can say these problems happen simply because most powerful people fucking us over are not elected, and they can and do choose which politicians will be on the ballot for us to fight over. Always have that in mind.