^ a self referential comment

fraud does happen, but it's greatly overshadowed by voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

Sorry if you're allergic to facts

this is the only good argument against voting in this thread honestly, it's a shame it's somewhat low, thanks for your input

i don't think not voting creates enough awareness at such scale. HK was a great example of protest abstention, but the main difference IMO is the dimensions: HK being somewhat geographically small compared to a whole country allows for efficient grassroots protests. coordinating such an effort at state level is incredibly ambitious to me, and as long as US folks keep bowing to their state i find it unthinkable that they could organize so properly and so swiftly to make not voting an efficient political action. thus i think defensive voting is better than not voting at all. i'll be more prone to protest abstention once either the US starts burning stuff for real (france is a good example) or the US empire fragments enough to be "local". rolling over and letting things be just allows the state to consolidate power, only strengthening the empire

the problem you're pointing at is liberalism, telling liberals not to vote is not going to make them less liberal.

because of your electoral system not voting is equivalent to voting for the winner, because there isn't a quorum at which an election is invalidated. take france: a 2-round system is not perfect but allows for genuine voting for small very left-aligned parties, and then eventually voting defensively later

your description of "basic human decency" is also very dishonest in my opinion: between bombing gaza and bombing gaza+venezuela+iran you can easily pick the lesser evil. while people in gaza see no difference (which is also arguable), two other countries, and people there, definitely do

i'm not arguing that using the master's tools will free us from masters, more must happen (france has many examples, again...), but it seems very clear to me that not using a tool to make a point is virtue signaling towards either peers (who are already aligned with you anyway) or opponents (who don't care)

btw i'd love to hear how this is "imperialist propaganda" and hear an opinion regarding actually addressing imperialism which is beyond "both bad" because last US low vote turnout didn't really seem to hurt the empire, or reduce the dropped bombs. there's always more proletariat than bourgeoisie so act like that

watch less tv, support local news networks. you know, part of the "communal help" you propose as an alternative

reminder this is a false dichotomy