Voting Sucks–But isn't Pointless
I sympathize with people who don’t vote. I understand their principles, their contempt for an unfair and unjust system. I share much of their attitude towards it. Despite what we were taught in public schools, and the rhetoric constantly spewed from the maw of the establishment, democracy is not an infallible system. True democracy is simply tyranny of the majority. The founders of America understood this; which is why we are a republic.
There’s one argument I hear from the anti-voting crowd that I don’t like, however. It goes like this: Your vote has never and almost certainly never will matter. No important election has ever been decided by a single vote. Presidential elections have only been swayed by one particular state a handful of times, and that particular state never by just one vote. Because your vote will never matter, you shouldn’t bother to, they say.
There are a few elements of this I’d like to consider. The first thing which I think is overlooked is the meaning of the phrase. What does it mean to say your vote does or does not “matter?” The view taken by those who proclaim that your vote doesn’t is that the only way for your vote to “matter” is for it to be the sole factor in determining the outcome of an election. If your vote isn’t the tiebreaker, it doesn’t “matter.”
I for one, discount this assertion. If a man is drowning, does any singular drop of water in his lungs matter? If someone is bleeding to death, does any particular drop of blood lost matter? If a woman develops radiation poisoning from a few thousand chest x-rays being done in the course of an hour, did any single x-ray matter? I’d say in every case, yes they do matter. None may have borne the sole responsibility for the outcome, but their contribution did have an effect even if in isolation it may have been harmless.
These might be attacked as fallacies of division; that I am insisting what is true for the group must be true for the individual. This is a fair consideration, and shouldn’t be dismissed. However, I feel it is important to reiterate, I am mostly concerned with the meaning of the word “matters.” I dispute that for something to matter, it must be the final arbiter. Contributions matter. If I am carving a statue, I don’t feel that the first chip out of the block is irrelevant just because it didn’t produce the end result. It was a factor on the way toward the end result, and is therefore important and necessary.
Indulge me briefly in a thought experiment. Ten Americans are dropped on a deserted island. Being patriotic sheep, they’re convinced democracy is the Best Thing Ever and they should vote on every issue. Things go smoothly for awhile, until they come to notice one of the castaways is contributing very little, and consuming a lot. Encouragement, admonishment, and supervision fail to effectively change his behavior. Frustrated, the individual the castaways look to for leadership calls a vote: he proposes they should put the slothful member of the group to death; he is nothing but a burden.
Although a radical proposition, the charismatic leader drums up sufficient support: 7 of the 10 castaways vote to put the lazy parasite to death. Now, let us pause and consider. For a principled libertarian, and hopefully nearly any moral person, execution is a completely unjustifiable punishment. However, the view that votes don’t matter should hold that none of them can be held accountable for the outcome of the vote. The winners had a sufficient majority to avoid a tie, even if one of them had decided not to vote, or voted differently. If none of their votes “mattered” they are absolved of responsibility at an individual level.
A final thought on the subject. Even if we assume that it is true to say that a single vote does not matter unless it directly affects the outcome by breaking a tie, we can only know if those conditions exist in hindsight. The odds of such a thing happening may be infinitesimally small, but they do exist. You cannot therefore claim unilaterally and definitively that your vote doesn’t matter until after the fact.
In the ancient arenas of Greece the crowd would display their thumbs to signify either mercy or death for a defeated gladiator. If they thought he fought bravely and deserved mercy, they would point their thumbs in the air; if not, they would point them down. This is the origin of the modern “thumbs up” and “thumbs down.” It was a death sentence carried out by a majority, by democracy.
I have no great love of democracy, it is merely the force of the majority taking what they wish from a minority. But whatever system we have, regardless of how flawed, we should always do what we can from within to reform it into something better. One tool at our disposal is voting, and while I have enormous respect for anyone who exercises their right to withhold their vote, I reject the idea that voting is a specious or pointless activity.
Posted by wobbles on Monday, April 04, 2011