• HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    It wasn’t so much confusing as it was over saturated, like not even half the candidates had statements in the voter pamphlet and many didnt respond to questionnaires or anything. City council was even worse, my district had the entire back of the page filled with candidates like 20+ names.

    I’m someone that likes to take time and research candidates, I’m all for choice, I’d rather have it than not, but I can certainly see how it turned people off of the idea, perhaps intentionally.

    • shutz@lemmy.ca
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      22 hours ago

      In a recent by-election I voted in, the ballots were 2-3 feet long with 91 candidates on them. This was in Canada, where we only have paper ballots. The majority of the candidates only registered as part of a protest to get the govt. to reconsider other voting methods than FPTP.

      • HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee
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        16 hours ago

        Woah! And I thought we had it bad here. There has to be a way to set some kind of reasonable barrier for entry

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      not even half the candidates had statements in the voter pamphlet and many didnt respond to questionnaires or anything.

      That has been annoyingly common in elections all over the place for as long as I can remember.

      You went to the effort of getting on the ballot, but you can’t be bothered to answer any questions or even tell people why they should vote for you?

    • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I used to be more lenient, but it’s 2024 and people running for elected political offices with ZERO online presence just pisses me off. I know this is gonna blow everyone’s mind, but a large percentage of voters wait till the day before election to research any candidates, sometimes for less than an hour before giving up. It’s probably why most of them don’t fill out information so a voter just chooses them and they’re less likely to dissuade someone if they don’t say anything, at least it might’ve worked in the past.

      It needs to be a required special-credit for highschool graduation to fully research and demonstrate you know the candidates on the ballet for your local election and register to vote. This could be bi-partisan, get everyone involved. It doesn’t take fully re-working a shafted education system to get more engaged voters.

      I’m just kinda miffed by the whole situation with Oregon, first the drug re-criminalization and now a RCV vote just got squashed. Can’t wait to hear about everything that went down like with Alaska and Maine.