From wikipedia: "Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties around the world. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct democracy (including e-democracy) or alternatively participation in government, reform of copyright and patent laws to make them more flexible and open to encourage innovation and creativity, use of free and open-source software, free sharing of knowledge (open content and open access), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, free speech, anti-corruption, net neutrality and oppose mass surveillance, censorship and Big Tech."
There's more to joining a party than voting. You can join the party that advocates for the issues you care about and vote for the party that could actually win and is the lesser evil
better to support via votes, funding, spreading-the-word, and volunteer efforts, than to label oneself a 'pirate' (or anything, really) on voter registrations, which are public data here. i'll stick with "independent" on that form, tyvm.
The issue is that the politicians benefitting from First Past The Post voting would need to be the ones to enact preferred voting. They benefit from FPTP because it locks voters into the two party “any third party vote is wasted” system. And they have zero reason to change that, because they would be legislating themselves out of office. The two big parties would suffer massive losses if people were able to vote for who they actually wanted, so those two parties have a vested interest in preserving FPTP voting systems.
I'm generally not a fan of party politics (though I realize you often have to bite the bullet on voting). But the pirate party here (Germany) is a really problematic bunch some of them thinking freedom means free markets some of them thinking free speech means they should be able to say hateful Nazi shit ... Really not a party I want to vote for, even in a pinch.
In the context of an intense commitment to an open internet I’d honestly need to know a bit more about what this means in my own country’s pirate party. “Free speech” is often just a disingenuous shield when bigots want to be be bigots without social consequences.
They don't have to cover everything. Pirate Parties often ally with other parties that cover other specific problems, e.g. Piratenpartij & De Groenen ("Pirate Party" and "The Greens" alliance) in Netherlands, and they work well together.
They absolutely have to cover everything. The idea of voting a politician into office knowing they aren't competent in all aspects of their job is wild to me.
Am I going to vote for an MP that has no knowledge of policies on healthcare, welfare, etc? Of course not, that would be deeply irresponsible.
In ranked choice voting systems, single issue parties have a meaningful purpose, they don't need a full platform covering every topic of running a country, they just need to show the major party that gets their preference flow that people support their cause and they need to take note of where those votes came from
I've been voting pirate party for years now, though thankfully I am in a country with ranked choice / preference voting so I'm not damaging democracy by voting for a third party, in fact I believe I'm actively helping democracy by using the tools given to me.
In Australia they are now part of the Fusion Party, which combines pro-science, pro-choice, pro-environment and secular minor parties.
I love piracy like I love electricity - it makes my life easier, and I will extoll the virtues when asked. It doesn't rise to a core political belief for me, though.