Absolutely - to be clear, I mean voting for new parties/candidates promising to "change everything", by getting 2% of the votes, and 0 seats. That's especially tragic if the country in question applies something like the
D'Hondt method that disproportionally boosts top runners (intended to help form a stable government).
Handling >2 runner voting results in a fair manner is more complex than it sounds, but generally, elections where you can rank your favorites ("Sanders, otherwise Biden, otherwise a cardboard cutout of Biden") and provide good-enough representation would get rid of most strategizing the average person isn't equipped to parse.
Of course, any two-party system beats a gerrymandered, over-bureaucratized, registration-requiring, purging-allowing, no-holiday, count-deadline two-party system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jcro21
I just think a lot of the Russia hysteria is overblown - yes they may be trying to stoke the fires of division between us or whatever, but those divisions exist [...]
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In some cases it's ironically healthy to amplify certain divisions (by dragging issues into mainstream, letting people get accustomed to it and form own opinions), but it becomes problematic when close to US elections.
Speaking of divisions more broadly, here's Trump in office; right now when you take a look at Sanders folks' Twitter feeds, the current state of affairs is that Biden has a mental illness (pretty much a conclusion on KATG as well); and the plan is to vote for the nominee (and that's just a shortcut term, because whoever it is, they're going to a much better choice than Trump - we know the options). Lack of very loud, very clear, very simple endorsements on behalf of every reasonable candidate and movement involved in the election may result in 2016 v2. Most reasonable arguments are not the loudest, it's the opposite - so odds are that people barely interested in politics won't go out for the nominee, because they misunderstood how democracy works.
Also, let's not mix hand-wrestling Jesuses with attempts at establishing relationships with upcoming/present administration. The former is a nuisance solved by raising an educated society (and perhaps kept in check by campaign conduct oversight), and the latter a political fiction-level counterintelligence nightmare.