Please excuse my circumvention of the locked topic by deleting it and starting it again. Please don't lock my account.
August West said:
"What if the independent candidate running in my local elections is a certifiable idiot?"
well then in that case I think you should write in the name of someone who's not an idiot. Or you should try to get on the ballot yourself. Unless your name is Asherdern. ;-)
I mean, this political process, of having just two choices, I don't think it's a good idea. Everyone knows it's not a good idea. But we're sort of trapped in it, because whatever party's base is the first to realize this is going to hand control over to the party's base that doesn't realize this. So the bases of the two parties are playing chicken with each other, each voting for the least undesirable least evil least do-nothing primary candidate of their party, and in the end both parties lose this game of chicken. It's obviously impossible for one guy to best represent the interests of 50% of the population, therefore, we should have more than two parties. Instead of splitting representation 50/50, we need to split it 10/20/25/20/15/10. Something like that. Politicians would get a lot more done and public policy would be a lot less stupid if the balance of power resulted in a complex situation like a 10/20/25/20/15/10 split. But no, we have a 50/50 split, and so politicians are playing simple games on a simple playing field. When the political game is simple, everyone loses, because reality is complex.
So fuck it, I'm voting independent.