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Anyone else considering spoiling their ballot in the next election? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by K3zi4@lemmy.world to c/uk_politics

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Don't get me wrong, I will probably cave at the last minute and vote SNP again for a number of reasons. Mostly, being supportive of a number of their progressive policies that I have benefited from over the years, and also because my constituency is a two horse race between them and the Tories who I will never vote for. Though the SNP are probably now at their lowest point in years since they finally managed to oust Sturgeon.

I will also never vote Labour, they have no identity here and during the 2019 election they were campaigning for the Tories to oust SNP here, so 100% fuck them too.

I once voted for Lib Dem and we ended up with the catastrophic Clegg/Cameron coalition (though due to FPTP my vote didn't matter there.)

I would like to vote for Green, but it would be a wasted vote here.

It's just bizarre to me that Westminster's voting system is such that a vast majority of votes in the UK are binned, how is this considered normal?

Sorry for the rant, but I am just so incredibly disillusioned with politics in this shitehole of a country but absolutely refuse to be passive about it since that is what they want us to be.

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[–] Jho 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I think it's better to vote for a party which has no chance of winning than to spoil your vote. At the very least it communicates what kinds of policies you would like to see and what policies would win your vote in the future.

I constantly think about the 2015 general election and how UKIP got almost 4 million votes (the third highest number of votes amongst all the parties). I feel that this caused a shift within the Conservative party towards populist, Eurosceptic, and anti-environmental ideals because they realised by doing so they could win back those 4 million voters.

I would personally never spoil my ballot for this reason. I don't think it's especially valuable to communicate that you're not happy with anything without communicating what would make you happy.

I'm currently in a circular debate with myself as to whether to vote Labour or Green. The classic eternal debate of "splitting the left vote" which we must deal with since we use an archaeic First-Past-The-Post system which should not exist in any modern democracy. I don't even especially like the Greens but a vote for them may communicate that one of my biggest values is preserving the environment and tackling climate change. Perhaps this could encourage Labour to establish policies to address these things in order to win back Green votes.