The vote delusion
I’ll level with you: I’m a “conspiracy theorist.” Although I think the label “not a sucker” is more accurate (not least because most others I find in the conspiracy theorist camp are still suckers), I’m not going to belabor the point. After all, what’s in a name right? Anyway, having said that, it should come as no surprise that I think the spectacle of national elections is nothing but a sophisticated charade. More to the point, I don’t think that casting ballots ultimately counts for anything.
There are two ways I could argue this point. One is to say that the voting system is broken (or corrupted) and that whatever the final tally happens to be, it does not necessarily match the popular opinion; the second is to say that, regardless of whether or not the ballot system is accurate, the quality of the “choices” listed on the ballot are not different enough from each other to count as real choices.
Regarding the former, I think it is worth appreciating how little voters actually know about how their votes are counted. For whatever reason, the majority of voters simply assume that their ballots go wherever it is they’re supposed to go and get counted exactly as they should be counted. It’s a wonderful way to live life—you know, pretending that everything works exactly as advertised—but the reality of the matter is that there is just as much reason to suspect that the system is flawed as there is to suspect that the system is flaw-less. To illustrate this point, let me draw an analogy with money.
On Sep. 10, 2001, the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly stated before the Defense Department the following: “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” Yeah, you read that right—2.3 TRILLION dollars…missing. Oops. Whether you think that was a result of simple accounting errors, gross negligence or outright corruption, it is nevertheless suggestive of how carefully our government can handle the counting and tracking of things.
If you don’t like that analogy, fine—maybe 2.3 trillion dollars isn’t comparable in value to our precious votes—but what if I told you that your own Supreme Court decided that your votes don’t need to be counted? If you bear with me, we can go back to the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. After issues of improperly tallied votes in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that an accurate recount of the votes in question was unnecessary, and subsequently granted the election to Bush. Maybe I don’t understand because I’m not on the Supreme Court (nor am I a lawyer for that matter), but isn’t it imperative that for an election to be legitimate that all votes (especially deciding votes) be counted and counted accurately? If all votes are not counted, and your Supreme Court says they don’t need to be counted, then isn’t your voting system a little flawed? Or are things like, way different now that it’s 2008?
The second argument I have against voting is, in my opinion, the more powerful of the two, mostly because it holds irrespective of whether votes are accurately counted. This argument claims that the quality and diversity of viable presidential candidates is consistently too low to render our elections legitimate. Abstractly, to “vote” implies that one have “choices;” but more pointedly, for a vote to have “value,” the options between which the voter chooses must be diverse enough to faithfully represent all real options. In other words, the more choices a voter has to choose from, the more valuable their vote becomes. Think of it like apples. If I grab two apples from a barrel of rotten apples and ask you which one you would rather eat, regardless of which apple you ultimately choose, I’ve nevertheless discovered nothing about your taste in apples; nor have you gained anything useful in terms of lunch. Likewise, if a presidential election involves a mere two candidates, both sponsored from one of two gigantic, dogmatic, and wealthy political parties, is a choice amongst them really saying all that much? I am aware that there are third party candidates floating around (who, by the way, are consistently excluded from major televised presidential “debates”), but instead of assuming that they sufficiently fill-in the gaps left by the two major parties, why not look at all the options? Choosing not to vote is always one of those options.
What does it mean to “choose” not to vote? Despite popular belief, choosing not to vote does not mean that one is no longer politically active. On the contrary, intentional non-voters are arguably the most politically active citizens. I say this primarily because they recognize that the severity to which our country has gone astray cannot be dealt with on the level of voting alone. To put it bluntly, voting is a ridiculously simple, one-dimensional activity that literally anyone (informed or not) can do. It requires nothing in terms of intelligence, awareness or involvement. In my opinion, those that feel voting is enough to declare that they’ve “done their part” to better this country are both lazy and shortsighted—not only is voting easy, it has no prescriptive power (i.e. just because a politician says he’ll do X if you vote for him, that doesn’t mean your vote can make him do X once he’s in office).
More than anything, this country needs intelligent discourse over substantive issues—something that the empty cheerleading and sloganeering of today’s campaigns cannot possibly provide. Substantive discourse requires far more than simple “lesser of evils” thinking—it requires careful, attentive and unrestricted thought. By choosing not to vote, one not only chooses not to limit the scope of their political involvement to mere voting, but they also choose not to compromise their unique beliefs and ideas in order to fit in to one of two mainstream parties. By removing the impetus to conform to one party or another, an intentional non-voter maintains his or her integrity and ability to think clearly and openly, thus preserving their capacity to participate in substantive discourse.
Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; voting sure has been tried over and over again, why think this upcoming election will be any different?