9 Comments

I am in my seventh decade and I have been voting since I was about 19.

I have never felt that the ballot offers me a viable choice. I either either like the candidate or the party, but I almost never approve of both.

People are reduced to voting strategically to get a person “in” in order to get somebody else “out.”This doesn’t make any sense.

Possibly, if we had a different system where you had to make so many percent to get in power and no deals could be negotiated between second and third stringers, the system could be restored.

Boycott the ballot is a sensible movement that will give people a viable choice: none of the above!!!

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If a MAJORITY of voters disapprove of ALL the puppets, parties and financial corruption in the political system, it should remove the legitimacy of the government's authority and right to rule over us. We certainly shouldn't be forced to pay taxes to fund programs and policies that we don't support. We need a "None of the Above" option to reign in rouge governments and tyrannical psychopaths.

Strategic voting is like choosing between being beaten with a hammer or a baseball bat. We shouldn't have to endure either one.

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Great idea! I floated the same idea amongst Australians-didn’t get much in the way of response (voting is mandatory here)- so I hope you fare a lot better than me Don!

I love imagining the virtue signalling folk ready to start counting votes at 6 pm (as it is here)-only there is nothing, or not much at all to count!

They would be alert that something is wrong though, if nobody was coming through the door to vote on the day! (Saturday here) I think a “None of the above” option here would just keep the incumbent in office here, but I’m not sure. If the incumbent was retiring, I guess “none of the above” would work here.

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If you MUST vote, then just write "NOTA" (none of the above) across the face of the ballot. With electronic voting you'd have to leave everything blank and just walk away. An incumbent wouldn't have secured the legitimate right to rule in the current session.

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After searching for a while, I found that “informal” votes here don’t count towards anyone. So if every Aussie simply got their name crossed off, then didn’t vote properly, this would not count at all! I didn’t know this.

I’m also wrong in saying this type of vote is a “donkey vote”. A donkey vote is just numbering all the candidates on the ballots, in the order according to where the names appear. So if we vote 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc down the pages we are given, the vote still counts, but this is a “real” donkey vote. We get a lot of candidates on the ballot forms.

So I may just mention this in my travels around the internet. See, we can get fined if we don’t turn up to get our names crossed off, but once this is done, we can do what we like to the ballot papers, as long as we put them in the boxes supplied. (The officials watch us!) We don’t have to write anything for it not to count!

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That's good to know. Thanks for looking into that.

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Our system is strange, if you don’t vote properly, I think it counts as a vote to the incumbent. We call it “donkey voting”(nothing to do with democrats).

I’ll have to check it out. I didn’t vote properly for years, as I didn’t want any of them.

We don’t have electronic voting (yet).

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I like your thought Sylvia that no deals should be done between second and third stringers. In Australia, our Prime Minister got in with just 32% of the primary vote! Ridiculous! We have a uniparty here made up of at least 4, but maybe 5 political parties! We also seem to vote people out, as I usually find that not many are worthy of being voted in! They are, as Don says, puppets, corrupt puppets at that. Or we can call them useful idiots. Why are they so dumb that they don’t seem to realise WEF/Un/WHO won’t need them when their usefulness runs dry. They really seem to think they are a protected species. But they and their families, unless they are pets of WEF like Trudeau, will be left to fend for themselves in the disgusting system they helped create. Idiots!

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Supporting the internationalists is like signing a deal with the devil... beneficial in the short term but deadly at the end.

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