The Vote of Not Voting

A matter of conscience.

Christopher Cook asks “Should You Vote?” at the Advocates for Self-Government. He calls the system “fundamentally flawed,” meaning unfixable, or more accurately, inherently unworkable, and calls for new ways of doing things.

For too long we’ve heard that not voting is a sign of complacency. If only the winner of an election could see the obvious: if the plurality of registered voters didn’t vote at all, that is, if more people didn’t vote than voted for the winner, the winner should be humbled, because the winner was rejected and the system was rejected.

There are “non-complacency” reasons people don’t vote:

• “None of the Above.” No candidate is acceptable.
• “I don’t believe in this system.” It doesn’t serve us, and hurts many of us, no matter who’s in charge.
• Both of the above.

The reason I probably won’t vote at all, not even for “third-party” or independent candidates, is that I don’t believe in the system. I don’t believe in violence as the solution to problems, but the State functions only on violence. Everything it does is backed by the threat of kidnapping (arresting and jailing) or murdering us if we don’t comply.

One might say that the State isn’t founded on violence, but on self-defense. That sounds like a sensible theoretical moral justification for the State, but it goes against the history of how States originated and what they still do today.