Why I Don't Vote

Things happening in that part of the world regarded as "political" interest me more than they do most people. They almost always have. I can name all nine Supreme Court justices, the top Cabinet officials, the leaders from both parties in Congress, and some Congressional committee chairs. I'm not a wonk – I can't tell you who any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are (except the Chairman), I can't handicap legislation or political races, and I don't watch C-SPAN.

Until recently, I accepted without question the tenet of our civic religion that we must all vote, or feel guilty and ashamed for not doing so. Sometimes I would view the results, look at the name of the person I'd voted for, and realize that without my vote he or she would have had one less than appeared on the screen. That's how I calibrated my influence – the difference between what was and one less than what was.

Shortly before the elections of 2008 (in which I did vote), I read an article by an economist that was already four years old by that time. It makes some claims that are a little far-fetched, but overall it provided a mathematical underpinning for the growing unease I was feeling whenever I spent 30 minutes or more on a Tuesday to drive to a church two miles away, fight for a space in their constricted parking lot, make my way past gladhanding electioneers hoping to sway a few votes at the last minute, and then stand in a line to prove I had a right to be there and participate. All I had to show for my efforts was a little sticker they always insist you take ("I Voted") and my personal one-vote influence I could observe when viewing the results later that evening.

Sometime after 2008, I began to feel more and more that the exercise was irrational. As the article referenced above points out, there's no conceivable chance that one vote could make a difference in a presidential election. Another article I read recently noted that in all the races for the U.S. Congress that have ever occurred (thousands upon thousands for over two centuries), only once, in 1910 in Buffalo, was there a race that ended up being decided by one vote.

So you're left with less rational reasons for voting. They no longer made sense to me either. I don't care about feeling part of the community, about wearing that self-flattering "I Voted" sticker as a badge of membership. I don't believe that you lose your right to complain if you don't vote. In fact, our system is far more tilted toward individual rights such as free speech than it is toward insuring a democracy. As a cynical teenager in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist complained: "It's just free speech, that's all we've got. We can say whatever we like, then the government goes on and does exactly what it pleases. You call that democracy? It's like we're on a ship, headed someplace terrible, and somebody else is steering and the passengers can't jump off." And why would I want to spend any time participating in a fraud actually decided by the filthy amounts of ill-gotten money swilling around in campaign coffers and the comically overt bribery and extortion of candidates and incumbents, resulting in broken or ignored campaign promises and the inevitable compromises that are often worse than doing nothing at all would have been?

There may come a time when I vote again. It will be precisely when I'm feeling irrational, however. In fact, it may be when I'm tending toward both the irrational and the revolutionary, since the only true benefit of democracy as we understand that term in the U.S. appears to be the ability to stage a non-violent coup and rid ourselves of a particularly grotesque set of thieves who were elected the previous time. Until then, I'll content myself with glancing at election results as if they were the sports scores, reserving to myself the same right to complain about the elections and our governance that all of us do about what happens on the ball fields and sidelines of our favorite sport although we didn't go to practice or ever even play the game.