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Yakuzaice on 17 July 2011
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blkfish92 said:
chocoloco said:
blkfish92 said:
This is a great question as people are so blind and stupid they just vote for whatever candidate, for example if a person's family always voted republican that person will vote republican too without any actual knowledge of what the candidates views are.

Foolish words my dad votes republican and all his three children vote democrat or green party. Not everybody is a follower.


You're right not everyone is a follower, but the majority is, why do you think every state is listed as democratic or republican? That's because the majority vote the same as everyone else while you may get a few people like you and myself whom aren't brainwashed. 

Have you actually looked at election results?  Pretty much all of these 'Red' and 'Blue' states have gone with different parties in the last 40 or so years.  Minnesota hasn't voted Republican (for the presidential election) since 1972, yet in 2008 McCain got 44% of the vote.  It was even closer in 2000 and 2004.  Their voter turnout is generally between 50 and 60%.  It wouldn't take much to change the results of an election.  The same can be said of plenty of other states.

The closest you can get to a majority is the people who don't vote, and that is in the presidential elections.  Voter turnout has fallen under 40% since the 70's for midterm elections.  Without going in depth into voter turnout for each state, it seems the only state where Obama or McCain received less than 30% of the vote was in Hawaii where McCain received 27% (also DC, which was truly a landslide).  Even if we're generous and say Hawaii had a 60% voter turnout, it would only take 70% of non-voters to turn the election.  Now getting 70% of that group to vote for a specific person wouldn't be easy, but it goes to show that even the most tilted state can be turned if people would just vote.  Let's look at another state that is pretty much considered 'Red'.  If we assume the same 60% voter turnout for Texas, it would only take 17.8% of the non-voters (which would be 7.12% of the overall voting age population) to turn the election in Obama's favor.

Anyways, the moral of this post is that if you don't vote, don't bitch about the results.  Even if you hate both main candidates, there are enough people who don't vote that they could elect a third party candidate.  Is this realistic?  Not really, but a third party candidate getting maybe 20% of the vote will make a much bigger impact than not voting.