Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathgod
You make a number of good points. However, I'm mostly trying to draw attention to the fact that many people do in fact abandon voting for the party that most closely matches their stances on issues in favor of a "lesser of evils" choice that is more likely to defeat the "worse of evils" choice. This in turn leads to an undermining of the purported function of representative democracy, which is supposed to be that representatives in office are a true & accurate representation of the wishes of the populace.
This has a damaging effect on parties that are smaller and not well known, who may actually be better than any of the well-known choices, but can't win because the populace hasn't heard of them and/or don't know much about them.
Many may vote for Trudeau based on the fact that they legitimately like what he and other Liberal candidates have had to say during the campaign, but never forget that there is a huge difference between politicians saying what they will do when they get into office and actually doing those things when they get into office.
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I don't disagree with the majority of this.
But your last sentence is hilarious considering the original comment you made that set this off. If you think that, you must assume that all politicians are lying about their campaign policies and, ironically, THAT is when democracy fails. You can't just assign that assumption to the party most closely opposing your party without applying it to everyone. If you go in with the assumption that their not going to do what they say then there's no point to any of this. You have to assume they will at least try to do what they say to the best of their ability, otherwise you might as well abstain. Or start your own party that will some how make good on every single promise they make.
Seriously, has that ever happened once? There's an opposition for a reason.