I hate it when people say "if you don’t vote you don’t have a right to complain". I used to have this mentality until recently, when I learned a harsh lesson about democracy. What is the point in voting when all of the candidates suck? Okay, maybe you can just vote in the primaries that are held months ahead of the vote to ensure that a good politician gets nominated as the candidate by the party. But if shitty candidates get nominated by all of the major parties, then there is simply no point in turning up on Election Day. Especially when the legacy media and the missing link media pick and choose which candidates get the spotlight, allowing them to rig the primaries. Let’s not forget that, in America, third parties are either ignored or are complete jokes. But I hear so many American boomers dismiss these concerns by saying that you should just buck up if you didn’t vote, as if voting would fix the system. It won’t.

In Ireland, we don’t have primaries. Instead, you can just register to run for a local, a European or a parliamentary election as either a political party member or as an independent. We have multiseat constituencies, so there’s no limit to how many candidates a party can run in one constituency. We also use a complicated voting system called Single Transfer Vote, or STV. You rank the candidates on the voting card in order of preference. There is a quota that each candidate needs to reach in terms of votes he or she has one in order to get elected, and a recount is done until all seats in the constituency has been filled, or until no counts can be done, in which case the candidates with the most votes win. In a recount, the candidate with the least amount of votes gets eliminated, and the next preferences of those who voted for him will be transferred to the remaining candidates in the next count. Sounds like a better system than America’s? Not really. Because the Irish media can still ignore and deny coverage to minor political parties that they don’t like to prevent these parties from winning a seat in the election. Many Irish people vote for parties based on who their parents voted for without even looking at the candidate's policies. Politicians lie and shamelessly break promises. The media covers the asses of corrupt politicians. And because of our voting system, an unpopular candidate can still get elected if he runs in a 5-seat constituency against candidates from minor or unheard of parties or other unpopular candidates. I voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections. It looks like I won’t be voting again.

EDIT: all of the major political parties in Ireland are woke. The only parties that are against woke culture are Aontú, the National Party, the Irish Freedom Party, Renua Ireland and Anti-Corruption Ireland. They all ran candidates in the last election, and only one of them got elected - because he was already in our parliament and formed a new party after being expelled from one of the major parties.