If you participate in sham of voting, you’re responsible for what it creates

By David McElroy · November 5, 2012

Most educated and informed Americans will cast a vote for president by the end of the day Tuesday. I won’t be among them. I know quite a number of intelligent, informed and principled people who will also decline to vote. I’d like to explain my reasons — and I’d like to suggest that you consider joining us as non-voters.

For as long as you can remember, people have preached to you about your duty to vote. You’ve been told that a good citizen should vote. You’ve been told that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, as long as you vote. And you’ve been told that every vote counts. There are even elaborate emails that people spam each other with that tell all the alleged cases in which one vote could have changed history. (Never mind that the examples are a pack of lies. People who have agendas don’t need to worry about facts.)

The “majority rules” system is a civic religion, and voting is the ultimate act of worship. When you vote, you are showing your allegiance to the government, whether you intend to or not. The very fact that you participate legitimizes the system. Your participation says, “I believe this is a morally right way to decide who gets power.” After all, if you’re willing to vote for your candidate’s right to hold power, how can you be claim that the other candidate doesn’t have the right to hold power when he wins?

Some people claim that if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the government and what it does. That’s irrational and backwards. If you do participate, you logically lose your right to protest the outcome. Your very participation says you believe it’s right and proper to use majority rule to decide who gets to be “in charge.” Only by refusing to participate — and by declaring the system to be immoral and unjust — can you have the moral authority to say, “No. What you’re doing is wrong. And I’m not giving it my sanction.”

For me, the majoritarian system is immoral. But even if you don’t oppose it on moral grounds, what are you achieving by being part of it? Are you getting what you want? Or are you simply obeying what you’ve been taught? Even if you haven’t reached the point of opposing the entire system on moral grounds, let’s review three quick points.

First, your one vote pretty much can’t change anything. If you can do basic math, you know why. Even in a super close presidential election, there would be thousands or hundreds of thousands of votes separating the two candidates nationally. Even if we put it on a statewide level, your one vote isn’t going to throw a state from one candidate to another. It just doesn’t happen that way. If the vote is that close, it’s going to end up in the hands of lawyers and judges arguing over things that have very little to do with your one vote. (Can you say “Florida” and “hanging chads”?)

Second, when you vote, you become a partisan. You start viewing things through the lens of “your group” and you become increasingly dishonest as your emotions get involved. Then you start listening to more of the people on “your side” and you become entrenched. Even if you think you’re a completely reasonable and rational person, if you become a part of Team Red or Team Blue — even just to the extent of voting for one of them and hoping for victory for “your side” — you start seeing the world in a different way. You see your “team” as the good guys and the other “team” as the bad guys. You get caught up in the Red vs. Blue argument — and you lose sight of the real issues. (And if you’re voting for a Third Party candidate, it’s a different form of useless. It’s a protest vote, but it still suggests that the basic system has moral legitimacy.)

Third, since your vote can’t make a difference by itself, you’re voting for symbolic reasons. What message are you sending? You’re sending a message — to yourself, to the government and to people around you — that you grant moral legitimacy to this system. You send the message that it’s right and proper to expect Barack Obama or Mitt Romney to rescue us. You send the message that you accept majoritarianism as your civic religion.

Since your one vote can’t make any difference, why not try detaching yourself from the process for awhile? See what it feels like. Ask yourself if it would make any difference if you paid attention to things that actually matter in daily life instead of politics. You don’t have to tell anybody. You don’t have to announce to the world that you’re renouncing the majoritarian system. You don’t have to become a rebel. But just do it. See if the sun still comes up. See if it makes any difference to walk away from it.

When you get away from a Red vs. Blue mentality, you start to see that the solution can’t come from either of them. Even if you’re not sure where the solution might come from, you can at least quit wasting your time and energy on things that can’t work. And you can remove your moral consent from a system that is slowly destroying you.

I won’t be giving my moral consent to an immoral system on Tuesday. Will you?

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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