These are not contradictory at all.
People have to vote, and its easier to convince someone to NOT vote for the hated enemy, which implicitly gets them to vote for you.
Comment on Elon Musk’s X is betting that Australia is too weak to protect its elections
spiffmeister@aussie.zone 7 months agoCompulsory voting means any campaign has to be focused on actually getting people to vote for you
I don’t think this is necessarily true, did you miss the massive amounts of negative campaigning that happens every election?
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 7 months ago
spiffmeister@aussie.zone 7 months ago
I don’t think this is a useful definition of voting for
which implicitly gets them to vote for you. Seems to only be true if you think of there being only 2 parties, which is why I don’t think the definition is good.
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 7 months ago
You, being aware that there are more choices that Labor vs Liberal, are more educated than the vast majority of my family (and dare I say the community at large), who believe that voting for anyone else is “throwing their vote away”.
spiffmeister@aussie.zone 7 months ago
American politics infects Australian politics in many ways sadly.
abhibeckert@beehaw.org 7 months ago
The fact is in the 2022 US election, voter turn out was as low as 40% in some states and never anywhere even remotely in the same vicinity as Australian elections (over 90%).
spiffmeister@aussie.zone 7 months ago
This changes the effect of negative campaigning (people still show up in Aus vs the US), but the idea is to dissuade people from voting for someone, rather than encourage them to vote for you. This might have a positive effect on votes for the party doing the negative campaigning, but I think it’s a poor definition of convincing someone to vote for you.