Our voting system is itself flawed, and leads to the entrenchment of power in two parties, which are private organizations built for the purpose of consolidating political power.
As long as we have First Past the Post voting [0], we will be stuck with whatever candidates those two parties choose to offer us. We will not be able to use our votes to elect candidates who accurately reflect our political will - we will only be able to choose the lesser evil out of the options presented to us.
The political discontent arising from Trump's election and presidency should be used to change our voting system to something that doesn't suffer from Duverger's Law [1] or the Spoiler Effect [2], and that will allow the outcomes of elections to closely map the range and number of actual political opinions - i.e., something that makes electoral results accurately reflect the real will of the people.
I agree. Please continue to be active in this direction. In the meantime, voting is better than not voting in terms of having an influence on the system we do have.
I agree with your point, too, although I'm skeptical we can do much more than, maybe, polish the brass while the ship founders. Still, shiny brass (slightly nicer surroundings) is better than not.
I do think we need radical reforms if we want the ship to not sink, though, so I don't feel that encouraging people to vote, without urgently arguing that voting reform is necessary, is deeply meaningful.
On another current HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645), a Show HN about a tool for interactively modeling dynamic systems, I followed the tool's author back to their website, and found a really great interactive blog post about Building a Better Ballot [0]. I'm going to be spreading that around as much as I can; it seems to me the best tool/post for really understanding the various voting methods and some of their flaws. I hope you'll check it out and share it, if you also like it. (I'm in no way affiliated with the author or tool, for the record; just impressed by it.)
As long as we have First Past the Post voting [0], we will be stuck with whatever candidates those two parties choose to offer us. We will not be able to use our votes to elect candidates who accurately reflect our political will - we will only be able to choose the lesser evil out of the options presented to us.
The political discontent arising from Trump's election and presidency should be used to change our voting system to something that doesn't suffer from Duverger's Law [1] or the Spoiler Effect [2], and that will allow the outcomes of elections to closely map the range and number of actual political opinions - i.e., something that makes electoral results accurately reflect the real will of the people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect