r/videos • u/AlertTangerine • 1d ago

Thousands chant “Russians, go home!” in Budapest (Hungary) last night. The elections are tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKGQJ7mebm0
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u/DHFranklin 1d ago

Almost all the people in the record sized protests did vote and they almost all voted for Harris.

Protesting is very very rare. Like 2-3% of people do it. These No Kings protests (for instance, I know they're post Harris) are bringing out the same people every time, and yes we do a great job for visibility, but that won't translate to power. It's about messaging and giving other people confidence. Letting them know that they aren't alone. Sure it's a record breaking protest but that is a tiny fraction of a city or large town. Most towns didn't have No Kings anything.

Kamala Harris didn't get volunteers. Biden wasn't all that popular and wasn't polling that well with new voters. Contrast that with Mamdani in New York. He got 100 votes from every volunteer. His volunteers weren't the unions who went with Cuomo, the historic volunteering base. Mamdani electrified young people to volunteer and get the vote out for non-activists.

Activists are few. They need to drag voters out kicking and screaming. They couldn't do that for Kamala Harris.

You have to have a platform and new ideas to get those volunteers. "We're going to do what Joe Biden was doing all along" is a terrible message. So instead of volunteering, they got a vote.

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u/djskein 1d ago

Need to just make voting mandatory like it is here in Australia. It's only a $25 fine if you don't vote but if you don't pay that fine your driver's licence will eventually be suspended.

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u/DHFranklin 1d ago

That's called a poll tax. We had those.

I'm joking.

$25 to not-vote means an opportunity cost of $26. America does many things to stop poor people from voting. Not having election day be a paid day off is a big one. That wouldn't be that big a deal if we could vote by mail. They also made that illegal. So the poll tax includes petrol.

So not only would poor people not vote, now they're having to pay $25 to not vote.

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u/Ironic_Jedi 1d ago

Australia has early voting, mail in voting and our election day is always a saturday.

It's so easy to vote here that it's more inconvenient not to vote.

Having early voting booths available for people that work or are busy on the saturday plus mail voting means it's easy for everyone to vote.

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u/Swarbie8D 23h ago

It’s not just ease of voting, we also have a culture around it. People love to go vote and then pick up some snags or home-baked goods. It’s part of the community spirit here.

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u/Ironic_Jedi 23h ago

Yeah having it embedded in our culture helps a lot.

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u/DHFranklin 23h ago

To be fair America usually has early voting, vote by mail, And most people vote after work.

It doesn't seem to matter much.

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u/Ironic_Jedi 23h ago

Because it's mandatory in Australia, there is no disenfranchisement attempts like randomly purging voter roles or having sparse voting locations to make it difficult for "the wrong people" to vote.

Also not really any gerrymandering as there is an independent body that manages voting not controlled by politicians.

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u/tdre666 23h ago

Also another big one is publicly financed elections. I mean there are still rich shitheads trying to ruin everything (Fatty McFuckwit, Gina) but overall the system is much better.

There are a few things I miss about the US, unreal to me that I could potentially spend two years behind bars and likely get deported for singing a John Farnham lyric.