Poonaites: Elections begin day-after tomorrow. I’m voting for the People’s Guardian Party (Arun Bhatia). Help us get an independent candidate—who’s worked with the UN and has concrete plans to get this city’s infrastructure back on track (see http://tinyurl.com/top-priorities), and whose finances are public—elected in our constituency.

The lesser evil argument (voting for the more secular of the two mainstream parties) might seem like the way to go, but why keep sacrificing our constituency in an attempt to more precisely determine our national government? Coalitions are here to stay. A party that more closely reflects your values will enter into a coalition with the mainstream party that more closely reflects those very values.

So, vote for a candidate or party you believe in (or would like to believe in), and vote independent, because all the mainstream parties, whether you’d like to admit it or not, have a track record of violence and corruption, which should automatically disqualify them in our books, given that non-violence is the one most important value our country was founded on.

But most importantly, vote.