Quotes About Elections

When billionaires can give $50 million, $500 million to a campaign, and there's no limit, then it makes a mockery of 'one man, one vote.'

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey' stuff, she was right, there was nothing there. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it's no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza...it's sort of a marketing affair.

W]e have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionately gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.

On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates--as intended.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.

So you have to  ask, "Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?" You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: "the worse, the better." If you get the worse candidate in, it's going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.

The planned elections seem "more designed for the consumption of US Congress and world opinion than for the Guatemalan people."69

how much time and energy is devoted, and not to the issues that the candidates are raising, but simply to their relative strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis their electability: the personalities, the horse race, not the issues and so forth.

Lesser evil voting should be simply called elementary rationality and elementary morality.

America's politicians were concerned with nothing but the perpetuation of their own power through the next election cycle. The

Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

Without perspective, everything gets blown out of proportion. We catastrophize. The loss of privilege becomes harsh persecution. Opposition becomes hatred. And every legal or electoral setback becomes cause for anguish and despair. In short, we evaluate and extrapolate without putting God into the equation.

The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide.

Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections.

A political party now exists primarily as an apparatus for selecting candidates and getting them elected to office.

Wallace seemed to be speaking of Shelton's clear objective when the candidate said, "The Klan wants to grow until it makes every office seeker in Alabama doubt that he can be elected without the Klan's seal of approval.

A statesman is a man that can do what the politician would like to do but can't because he is afraid of not being elected.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

The aging chose the years of their youth, yet the young, who were not even born then, would have to live in those years. There was a certain injustice in that - choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.

All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile

Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.

Al terminar el siglo XX, México había construido las instituciones necesarias para disipar ese fantasma. Las elecciones habían empezado a ser creíbles. Había empezado a existir y a manifestarse una ciudadanía real. Por primera vez en la historia política de México los partidos políticos atraían el voto verdadero de una mayoría de mexicanos que efectivamente acudían a votar. Las elecciones