Automation that replaces the need for work can be a good thing, but only if it is used to ease the overall burden instead of making a bunch of people unemployed so that the capitalists who own the company can increase their profits. The idea of machines doing all the work sounds great, but if that means that the handful of people who own the machines have a great quality of life and everyone else suffers then that is not a good trade-off.

Most people don’t vote

About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say “half of eligible people don’t vote” let alone “most”

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf

So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.

The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of “turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best.”

Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.

Why would you need a passport if you aren’t leaving the country?

It’s a piece of paper you buy every ten years if you want to travel across national borders, it’s not like some intrinsic part of your being.

At the point that the new voter ID legislation was introduced, about 8% of the electorate - ~3.5m people - did not have a passport or a driving licence.

Some states do use their own definitions of terrorism to explain why it’s bad when other people do it but OK when they do it, but that’s definitely not a uniform definition.

the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

- Britannica

The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.

- American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants.

- Wiki

(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal

- Collins English Dictionary

the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes… government or resistance to government by means of terror.

- Webster’s

While some limited ecotage does happen, non-permanent disruption is more popular than permanent damage. And the more public, less relevant showboating stuff is what gets the public eye. Just Stop Oil got a lot more attention when they started sitting in traffic and throwing stuff at paintings and whatever than when they were focusing more on things like blocking oil terminals.

I’d recommend Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more discussion about more radical approaches to protest, but bear in mind that there is a distinction between strategic sabotage which can get public on-side and the sort of adventurism that ecoterrorism implies. As /u/lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml mentions below this has the risk of driving more people away anyway.

I’d really recommend Marxism Today’s youtube video about the film pseudo-adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, discussing both the risks and bad examples in that film itself but also the broader context of trying to encourage this.

Disruption and sabotage of fossil fuel machinery might be effective from a public optics perspective, as well as on a large enough scale hopefully impacting capitalist profits/making polluting ventures seem riskier to investors. However, ecotage is distinct from eco-terrorism and the latter should be avoided.

However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.

- Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours

The [Earth Liberation Front] realises that the profit motive, caused and reinforced by the capitalist society, is destroying all life on this planet. The ELF therefore feels that the only way to stop the destruction of life is to take the profit motive out of killing.

- ELF spokesperson in a 2003 interview