Twelve arguments for voting and how to refute them
Every year on Election Day, many celebrities, pundits, and other public figures tell us to “do your civic duty and go vote.” Numerous organizations make get-out-the-vote efforts to convince people to go to the polls. They employ several common arguments in such efforts. Let us examine twelve of these common arguments in favor of participation in electoral voting and explore how they may be refuted.
1. Voting is an act of self-defense.
An act of self-defense must target aggressors and only aggressors. Otherwise, the act is aggressive against the innocent bystanders who are harmed. Voting does not target aggressors and only aggressors; it targets everyone. Those who do not participate in a vote are still affected by the result of a vote. Even people who live in other countries and cannot vote are affected due to foreign policy. Thus, voting does not qualify as an act of self-defense.
2. If you do not vote, you have no right to complain.
This is exactly wrong. People who do not vote are the only people who have a right to complain. Those who vote for people who win elections are endorsing politicians and their minions who will engage in activities under color of law that would be punished as crimes if you or I did them. Those who vote for people who lose elections may not be vicariously responsible for state crimes in the same degree, but participating in the system helps to create the appearance of legitimacy for that which is inherently illegitimate.
3. You need to vote to cancel out the vote of other people who vote against your interests.
In the broadest sense, this is impossible. Every vote is against the interests of an individual, as every vote empowers the collective called the state at the expense of the individual.
4. Every vote matters.
The odds that your one vote will alter the outcome of an election are far less than the odds that you will be killed on your way to the polling place. And even if these odds were overcome, there is still no guarantee that your vote will be counted correctly. As Tammany Hall boss William Marcy Tweed once said, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”
5. If you do not vote, the bad guys will win.
The bad guys win when people do vote. Every vote helps to give the appearance of legitimacy to the process and results, regardless of which violent sociopath wins a particular popularity contest.
6. Voting is a fundamental right.
There is no such thing as a right to someone else’s justly acquired property, or a right to infringe upon someone else’s individual liberties. This does not change by cloaking one’s actions under euphemisms and asking agents of the state to commit the acts in one’s stead.
7. Voting is a civic duty.
A legitimate duty or obligation can only come from a legitimate right or contract. The social contract, from which civic duties and obligations emanate, is not a legitimate contract because it violates private property rights and freedom of association.
8. Your vote is your voice in government.
This statement assumes that there is no voter fraud, that votes are counted correctly, that vote results cannot be altered by courts, and that politicians will do what voters tell them to do. Each of these assumptions has an unfulfilled burden of proof at best, and is demonstrably false on several occasions at worst.
9. Just because voting has not worked in favor of liberty in the past does not mean it will not work in favor of liberty in the future.
One definition of insanity is the repetition of the same action under the same circumstances while expecting different results. Also, one would have to replace “voting” with “abstaining from voting” in order to be logically consistent, which makes for a good anti-voting argument.
10. Abstaining from voting is an apathetic action.
Doing nothing is preferable to doing something that is self-destructive and/or harmful to others. And who is really more apathetic: the person who continues to do that which has a proven track record of not advancing liberty, or the person who stops doing that?
11. Abstaining from voting will not accomplish anything.
Not necessarily. If enough people stop voting, the illusions of legitimacy and consent of the governed will vanish, revealing the true nature of the state so all can see it for the violent criminal organization that it is. In most elections, there are already more people who do not vote for anyone than there are who vote for any particular candidate, so we are not as far from this point as many people seem to think we are.
12. If we did not vote with ballots, we would vote with bullets.
The premise is asserted without evidence and may therefore be dismissed without evidence, but let us accept it for the sake of argument. If this is true, then voting has not prevented a Hobbesian war of all against all; it has merely sanitized such a situation. This has the downside of lowering the barrier of entry to committing violations of individual liberty and private property rights. If there were no agents of the state who could be asked to steal from others in one’s stead in the form of taxation or initiate violence against others in one’s stead in the name of law and order, then one would have to act on one’s own in order to do such things. Most people are not willing to engage in criminal activity so openly, and the few who are would be more easily identified and eliminated by moral people acting in self-defense if people had to use direct action rather than the indirect action of voting in order to commit aggression.
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