"A vote for 3rd party is a vote for Trump" is shorthand for "A vote for 3rd party instead of Biden is a vote for Trump".
All it means is "If you don't vote for Biden, Trump is more likely to win", which is a trivial statement.

If you were never gonna vote for Biden or Trump anyway, it doesn't matter what you do or don't do with your vote.
But by casting a valid vote, you're still legitimizing the current election system.
Unfortunately, there's no way to vote against the current system, since abstaining will be interpreted as not caring about politics and casting an invalid vote will be interpreted as being to dumb to vote correctly.

[–] macattack@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago

I think the issue is that constantly virtue signaling about it online has the risk of swaying other voters or making other voters check out completely