Mark E. Smith, fubarandgrill.org
(This article was edited and updated on April 8, 2012. It is reposted here per reader request)
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he most common activist strategies, such as street demonstrations, protests, etc., rarely seem to bring about any change in government. There is only one nonviolent tactic that has been proven to work. Recently I asked the new president of a local activist group that had banned me from speaking, if I would be allowed to speak under the new leadership. I explained that I’m an election boycott advocate. The reply I got was:
“So my question is – how does NOT voting change anything? I can see actually writing in someone you believe in – but not voting simply is giving up.”
I decided to answer the question as thoroughly as I could. Here’s what I wrote, which I’m posting here with the person’s name removed:
1. Not voting is doing nothing.
When you vote, you are granting your consent of the governed. That’s what voting is all about. If you knowingly vote for people you can’t hold accountable, it means that you don’t really care what they do once they’re in office. All you care about is your right to vote, not whether or not you will actually be represented or if the government will secure your rights. Prior to the ’08 election, when Obama had already joined McCain in supporting the bailouts that most people opposed, and had expressed his intention to expand the war in Afghanistan, I begged every progressive peace activist I knew not to vote for bailouts and war. They didn’t care and they voted for Obama anyway. That’s apathy. But it’s worse than that. Once I had learned how rigged our elections are, I started asking election integrity activists if they would still vote if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet. About half just laughed and said that of course they wouldn’t. But the other half got indignant and accused me of trying to take away their precious right to vote. When I finished asking everyone I could, I ran an online poll and got the same results. Half of all voters really are so apathetic that they don’t care if their vote is flushed down a toilet, as long as they can vote. They really don’t know the difference between a voice in government, and an uncounted or miscounted, unverifiable vote for somebody they can’t hold accountable. They never bothered to find out what voting is supposed to be about and yet they think that they’re not apathetic because they belong to a political party and vote.
10. If you don’t vote, you’re helping the other party.
No, *you* are. By voting for an opposition party, a third party, an independent, or even writing in None of the Above, Nobody, Mickey Mouse, your own name, or yo mama, you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins, not by the candidate you voted for. If there is a 50% turnout, the winning candidate can claim that 50% of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance.
11. If we don’t vote, our votes will never be counted and we’ll have no leverage.
True, if we don’t vote, our votes will never be counted. But how does hoping that our votes *might* *sometimes* be counted, provide leverage? The election just held in the UK had only a 32% turnout. Where people did vote at all, since UK votes actually have to be counted, they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties (George Galloway’s Respect Party for one, the Pirate Party for another) and in Edinburgh, a guy who ran dressed as a penguin, calling himself Professor Pongoo, got more votes than leading major party candidates. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
12. The choice is bullets or ballots, so it’s a no-brainer.
The Department of Homeland Security has just used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted, to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens. Your ballots authorized those bullets. There is a third option: not voting, not fighting, but simply withholding our consent. That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesn’t represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed. It is a legal, nonviolent, effective option called noncompliance. Noncompliance can take other forms, such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems, but these cannot delegitimize a government. Since governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us.
13. Evil people are spending millions of dollars on voter suppression to deny minorities the vote, and people have fought and died for the right to vote, so the vote must be valuable.
Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote. While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation, they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets. If they didn’t want people to vote, those proportions would be reversed and they’d be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote. Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them, their uncounted, unverifiable votes for oligarchs who won’t represent them, must be valuable.
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Easy reference–
Five of Fubar’s top essays on voting (including this one) are now in one place for ease of access:
http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1431
The link is also on our front page, on the top right hand side of the blue banner, as “Consent to Tyranny: Voting in the USA”
Last week Terri, who is organizing a 2012 election boycott as a direct action, reposted “You’ve Got to Stop Voting” in the diary section of a site called FireDogLake and it was deleted by the admins, which led to this discussion on Fubar getting about 2,000 more hits from folks who wanted to know what it was that they weren’t supposed to be allowed to read. Permission is granted to anyone to repost my writing anywhere they wish–spread the word! If you post parts or all of any of my essays to a website that has banned me, such as OpEdNews (dot) com or BlackBoxVoting (dot) org, a website that suspended me indefinitely like Care2 (dot) com, or a website that just doesn’t like me, like BradBlog (dot) com, you can delete my name as author in hopes that it won’t be censored as quickly.
The Powers That Be are spending at least six billion dollars trying to get out the vote for the 2012 election http://anti-imperialism.com/2012/08/23/more-us-parasitism-6-billion-to-be-spent-on-sham-election/ and a substantial part of that goes to political operatives and websites dedicated to protecting capitalist imperialism and the status quo.
I wish Rossi had lived to see this.
As a very small, relatively unknown website, where it was unusual for an article to get more than 150 total hits, in rereading this thread I noticed where only a little over a year ago we were all very excited when Rossi noticed that this essay was getting about 10 unique hits a day.
It now has over 17,000 views and consistently gets more than 200 unique hits a day. Rossi would have been very happy. As an expatriate who lived most of his adult life in Germany, he never lost his Kansas roots and never gave up on the citizens of the United States, no matter how far from coming to our senses most of us appeared to be. Rossi knew, after serving in Germany when he was in the army, that he no longer wanted to live here, and he was fully appreciative of Germany’s superior labor laws, honest elections, socialized medicine, and other benefits. He griped cheerfully about being a wage slave for a large multinational corporation, and he remained an unrepentant far left radical in his politics.
Rossi qualified for full German citizenship, but never applied. I remember when he decided to vote in a US election and went through all the trouble of obtaining an absentee ballot and spending close to $10 to mail it, to be absolutely certain that it would arrive in time, only to learn later on that his ballot had never been counted because his state had no requirement that absentee ballots be counted. He never did it again.
This is for you, Rossi. We’re not as good as you wanted us to be, but we’re better than we thought possible only a year ago. Thanks for supporting us through our Dark Ages–I hope you’re in a place where you can see that we’re waking up.