The wasted vote

[Weston White]

No such thing as a wasted vote. Voting your conscience is the best vote you can make, and the only one that means anything.

"We engage in the election the same as in any other principle: you are to vote for good men, and if you do not do this it is a sin: to vote for wicked men, it would be sin. Choose the good and refuse the evil. Men of false principles have preyed upon us like wolves upon helpless lambs. Damn the rod of tyranny; curse it. Let every man use his liberties according to the Constitution. Don’t fear man or devil; electioneer with all people, male and female, and exhort them to do the thing that is right. We want a President of the U.S., not a party President, but a President of the whole people; for a party President disfranchises the opposite party. Have a President who will maintain every man in his rights.” (Hyrum Smith, Source: History of the Church, Vol.6, Ch.15, p.323)

"I will tell you whom to vote for: we will vote for the man who will sustain the principles of civil and religious liberty, the man who knows the most and who has the best heart and brain for a statesman; and we do not care a farthing whether he is a Whig, a Democrat, a Barnburner, a Republican, a New Light or anything else." ( Brigham Young, "Discourses of Brigham Young" pg. 358)

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” (John Quincy Adams, American 6th US President 1825-29, eldest son of John Adams, 2nd US president. 1767-1848)

Such infallible reverence should always and at all times be heeded to.

 

[Mini-Me]

A single vote doesn't matter in the same way that each minute that you work, or each quarter that you're paid, doesn't matter. I mean, seriously, it's just a minute, right? It's just a quarter. You don't need it. Clock out a minute early. Since the hours are made of minutes, clock out before you clock in. If one minute is insignificant, they're all insignificant, and if a quarter is insignificant, so is your whole paycheck. Each bite you eat...insignificant. You don't need it, so why not just starve?

Each vote DOES matter. It matters a very small amount by itself - so small that it appears insignificant, and it appears not to matter - but it does, because there are MANY of us. Where we put our votes, and how many of us stop massaging ourselves with bullshit excuses, determines the amount of influence we will have. I hold no realistic hope that Gary Johnson is actually going to win - which should reassure those who don't trust him anyway (reassure them that Obama or Romney will win, at least ) - but there IS hope that we can bump up the LP's totals from 1% to 2%, or 3%, or 5%, or 8%, and that's something to point to in the future to convince others to start making their votes matter too. Any vote for Obama or Romney doesn't matter; it's a wasted vote, because they would both continue making this country worse in their own special ways. Any vote against them - as long as it's actually counted and reported - does matter, because it actively demonstrates not just apathy (like abstaining) but OPEN DEFIANCE. The louder we roar, the more we will encourage others to join us in the future.

All of this talk about "withdrawing consent" sure sounds noble, but guess what? It will never, ever, EVER restore liberty. All it lets you do is pat yourself on the back for reaffirming your commitment to anarchism to yourself. Guess what? If you're an anarchist, you already damn well know you're an anarchist! You already know that no matter what you do, you will never believe the state is legitimate or truly give consent. Are you really so insecure in your own beliefs that you think voting can undermine them? REALLY? Voting only implies consent if you MEAN it to, and if you mean it to say, "My soul belongs to you." It doesn't have to imply consent, and it doesn't to me! My soul is my own. It doesn't have to make the state "your" state; voting is nothing more than a tool to influence someone else's state to be less onerous, because you know damn well that it's going to violate you day in and day out anyway, whether you consent to it or not! It's a small tool of limited effectiveness, and it works by chipping away at your prison walls with a rock hammer (sound familiar?) rather than demolishing them with a wrecking ball, but in case you haven't noticed, wrecking balls are in short supply around here.

Furthermore, nobody else will ever even know your refusal to vote symbolizes withdrawal of consent other than yourself and the small group of people you tell on the Internet as part of a self-serving feel-good libertarian circlejerk...why? It's because everyone else lumps you in with the apathetic masses, who are mostly oblivious to the ways in which the state affects them, and who couldn't care less which of the choices on the ballot actually became President.

If you really DON'T care, you are looking at this completely the wrong way: Gary Johnson for instance is totally unprincipled, but he's not just the lesser of two evils. He's the lesser of GOODS (compared to Ron Paul), because he unlike any major party candidate for years actually intends to reduce government. He doesn't want to reduce it as much as me, or you, but he does want to reduce it. That's not "compromising with evil." It's taking the most new ground you can, and maintaining the most old ground you can, at this particular moment. It's a move in the right direction, no matter how small, and successive moves in that direction would counteract the constant downward spiral that other voters have put us on by consistently voting exclusively for establishment candidates (all of which want to INCREASE the government in at least one area, usually MANY areas...unlike Gary Johnson). Further elaboration: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...nson-Statist&p=4490518&viewfull=1#post4490518

Some people seem to live in a fantasy world where, if enough of us just "ignore" the state, it will go away. Reality check: It won't. It exists, whether you consider it legitimate or not. I don't, but its guns are real, and its prisons are real, and symbolically "withdrawing consent" in the comfort of your underwear isn't going to change the reality of that situation. WHETHER OR NOT YOU "CONSENT," PEOPLE ARE STILL BEING EXTORTED AND BEATEN AND SHOT AND BLOWN TO BITS AROUND YOU. If you want to actually change the reality of the situation, you have to take real, tangible action in the physical world outside of the confines of your own brain and computer chair. Agorism isn't enough either, because real economic production requires formal investment and large-scale capital goods that cannot be permanently hidden from the state, which means there will ALWAYS be enough of an "above-ground" market for the state to tax. Barring violent revolution, only a massive tax revolt or political action will actually allow us to change the world around us, as I argued last night (pissing in the wind a bit, since the thread got buried). This applies even in the event of government collapse, because the vast majority of people (even most liberty-leaning people) are nowhere near ready for anarcho-capitalism or any other kind of anarchism. They WILL create a new state to replace the old one, and most people WILL consider it legitimate, and only political action (such as becoming a powerful delegate to the new "Constitutional conventions") is going to give you a say in what kind of state that's going to be: Some form of minarchy that might someday be dissolved after people gradually become comfortable enough with the idea...or Cthulhu?

Do you know what I have seen in my time here? I have seen hardcore libertarians with near-genius intellects who have convinced each other - likely with the interventionary help of COINTELPRO - to retreat as far as possible into their comfort zones, sit by the fire, and idle away reading philosophy books instead of getting out of the house and becoming the leaders of this movement they were born to be. You are the MOST intelligent people in this movement and the MOST principled people in the world, and you have the power to ignite brushfires in the hearts of humanity and be an example to everyone, just like Ron Paul...or even better, if you dare...and you are throwing it all away, because someone else has pinpointed and fed your own biases to manipulate you into docility! There's a time for reading books and becoming even more knowledgeable than you already are, especially when it comes to intellectual ammo like Austrian economics, but sooner or later you have to ACT, or you will grow old and die with your knowledge locked away in your head and only partially passed on to those nearest to you. This applies to me too: I have hardly acted in any meaningful way, and I need to change that about myself, but I can at least take comfort knowing that I haven't tried to convince others to waste their potential.

I've even seen some people told to chase their tails and move on to works that are even more philosophically abstract, like Jacques Ellul and Baudrillard. All of these are great works, but they're works that only near-genius intellects are even interested in comprehending...hardly efficient tools to help you educate or persuade the masses, let alone become a leader with the courage, perseverance, and manpower to effect actual change in the world and bring down the leviathan state. Still others have been told to read Bertrand Russell's work on scientific methods of control and take it to mean, "The establishment has us locked down, and we might as well just sit on our asses and not try to fight back, because the system is constructed such that anything we do just helps them and corrupts our own souls." This is BULLSHIT. It's certainly the establishment's goal to create a failsafe system of control, but they will only accomplish that if you LET them.

The establishment's goal is "full spectrum dominance," but guess what? Convincing extremely intelligent libertarians of the establishment's omnipotence and omnipresence is part of that, meant to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a propaganda VECTOR that's specifically targeted at neutralizing the most intelligent and analytical sons and daughters of liberty...the very people who would otherwise pose the greatest threat to the state and have the greatest potential to inspire political rebellion from the rest of us! Break free of your conditioned paralysis and ACT!

Take over GOP positions so we can field enough liberty candidates to finally make a difference. Vote for the best candidates available in any election, so long as at least one wants to REDUCE the state across the board rather than expand it. I have no doubt each of us will get burned by betrayal from time to time, but the choices of others will burn a whole hell of a lot more if you refuse to give yourself a voice out of "principled" paralysis. Make friends. Build credibility. Run for office someday...and set the bar even higher than Ron Paul! Just don't sit on your ass and pat yourself on the back, pretending it makes you a freedom fighter, and for God's sake, don't use your talent for argument to convince others to do the same!

 

[jonruh52]

No such thing as a wasted vote. Voting your conscience is the best vote you can make, and the only one that means anything.

"We engage in the election the same as in any other principle: you are to vote for good men, and if you do not do this it is a sin: to vote for wicked men, it would be sin. Choose the good and refuse the evil. Men of false principles have preyed upon us like wolves upon helpless lambs. Damn the rod of tyranny; curse it. Let every man use his liberties according to the Constitution. Don’t fear man or devil; electioneer with all people, male and female, and exhort them to do the thing that is right. We want a President of the U.S., not a party President, but a President of the whole people; for a party President disfranchises the opposite party. Have a President who will maintain every man in his rights.” (Hyrum Smith, Source: History of the Church, Vol.6, Ch.15, p.323)

"I will tell you whom to vote for: we will vote for the man who will sustain the principles of civil and religious liberty, the man who knows the most and who has the best heart and brain for a statesman; and we do not care a farthing whether he is a Whig, a Democrat, a Barnburner, a Republican, a New Light or anything else." ( Brigham Young, "Discourses of Brigham Young" pg. 358)

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” (John Quincy Adams, American 6th US President 1825-29, eldest son of John Adams, 2nd US president. 1767-1848)

This is exactly how I feel. If people don't start voting on principle but instead continue playing these "oh i might waste my vote" "a vote for ron paul is a vote for obama" "he has no chance of winning" games then this country will keep sliding towards fascism.

 

[cjm]

A single vote doesn't matter in the same way that each minute that you work, or each quarter that you're paid, doesn't matter. I mean, seriously, it's just a minute, right? It's just a quarter. You don't need it. Clock out a minute early. Since the hours are made of minutes, clock out before you clock in. If one minute is insignificant, they're all insignificant, and if a quarter is insignificant, so is your whole paycheck. Each bite you eat...insignificant. You don't need it, so why not just starve?

+rep. I wish I had a +10rep button for this post.

And once you realize that every vote matters, you can see that every phone call matters, every donated dollar matters, and every door you knock on matters too. And when you're not campaigning, working with your local party matters, participation in non-political community groups matters, and every conversation with a friend or stranger matters.

 

[donnay]

Voting your conscience and voting on principle is is never a wasted vote.

 

[Elwar]

If you believe your vote play no role at all in electing the president, the entire first part of the post was superfluous. That assumption is new.

My vote will play no role at all in electing the president.


As others have noted though, activism, money, support and getting others to vote a certain way do.

The 2000 election was within a margin of about 100-200 people.

We, each of us, has the ability to get 100-200 people to vote one way or another, thus changing an election. Whether it is through door to door campaigning, a donation that turns into votes, educating friends and relatives, attending rallies, volunteering, etc. Those are the only things that count. If you want one candidate to win over the other, you will do those things to get them elected.

Otherwise, if you think that the mere act of voting will have any affect. You are wasting your time.

 

[kuckfeynes]

A single vote doesn't matter in the same way that each minute that you work, or each quarter that you're paid, doesn't matter...

Holy wall of text. You really put a lot of faith in man. I wish you the best of luck in your crusade, but when you are wringing your hands because you unwittingly voted in the next Reagan in the name of liberty, my conscience will be clean.

As George Carlin once said, "If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote..."

People are going to die one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned, the blood of any Iranians that died as a result of the US sanctions that Rand voted for is on the hands of those that supported him. You can either help legitimize the system that enables it or not. If you're willing to do so, and you don't like blood on your hands, you'd better be damn sure that that person can be trusted with the power of the office. An impossible task if you ask me.

 

[cjm]

My takeaway from the last two posts is that my vote has absolutely no effect on the outcome of an election but I am held morally responsible for that outcome?

 

[kuckfeynes]

My takeaway from the last two posts is that my vote has absolutely no effect on the outcome of an election but I am held morally responsible for that outcome?

Correct. A single vote itself is meaningless. Your support overall, however, is not.

 

[Mini-Me]

Holy wall of text. You really put a lot of faith in man. I wish you the best of luck in your crusade, but when you are wringing your hands because you unwittingly voted in the next Reagan in the name of liberty, my conscience will be clean.

As George Carlin once said, "If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote..."

George Carlin speaks from his own personal perspective, not objective truth, and CHOOSING to adopt his attitude is CRIPPLING you. George Carlin was a good man, but he gave up, because he knew he would never live to see anything better, and he didn't care anymore. He.Didn't.Care.Anymore. Is that really who you want to be? Your attitude is a choice, and you are choosing the one that leads back to your comfort zone, back to complacency, and away from even attempting to reduce government, in the fear that you might accidentally get burned by someone who goes the other way. Do you think Rothbard would have adopted this attitude? He didn't, and he wouldn't, and he just might have correctly recognized it as the internalization of insidious COINTELPRO propaganda. You're specifically choosing to listen to the people who tell you to do the least for liberty and put up the least fight against the state, and you're parroting those same arguments to others so they'll give up alongside you and be there to reassure you that you "did the right thing." Is that really the logical choice, or do you think that maybe, just maybe, you using elaborate but intellectually dishonest arguments to rationalize the laziest and most complacent possible behavior to yourself?

Any investment implies risk, not least of all investment in a politician, but you have to invest somewhere if you want any hope of holding your ground, let alone gaining more, when someone else is stealing your liberty and selling it for parts. If you and others like you don't vote, someone else will not just "maybe," but DEFINITELY increase government. If you do not vote, you may reserve your right to complain from your underwear - which I still reserve anyway on my own terms, so you've gained nothing real - but you will stand aside without even attempting to rein in the government. Washing your hands of it all sure feels good, but it's completely self-serving, self-congratulatory, and pointless. No one else will ever know that's what you did, except yourself and your friends on the Internet, who will pat you on the back for disengaging and have you pat themselves on the back as well in a self-feeding cycle of lost potential. The establishment will assume they've cowed you into giving up...because really, they did. The rest of us will assume that you can't be bothered to lift a finger against the state or the establishment's anointed politicians, because you can't.

People are going to die one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned, the blood of any Iranians that died as a result of the US sanctions that Rand voted for is on the hands of those that supported him. You can either help legitimize the system that enables it or not. If you're willing to do so, and you don't like blood on your hands, you'd better be damn sure that that person can be trusted with the power of the office. An impossible task if you ask me.

So, your solution is...give up? Just let the establishment appoint the worst tyrants available every single election and sprint toward totalitarianism in the paralyzing fear that if you take action, something you do might indirectly help them on occasion? Because without a massive tax revolt or political action, there will never be liberty. EVER. Heck, even if the government collapses - or is magically overthrown by violent revolution - only political action or a tax revolt out of the gate are going to restrain the size and scope of the NEXT state, because only in your wildest wet dreams does there exist a scenario where the majority of people won't want another one.* Your vote matters, as I argued before...everything you do matters. Putting your fingers in your ears and shouting, "La-La-La, I can't hear you" does not refute the irrefutable work time and paycheck analogy. You either do what you can for liberty in the face of uncertainty, or you keep your hands "clean" and proudly concede to a boot stomping on a human face...forever.

*This will not always be the case, and they can eventually be brought around, but they cannot be brought around the same way you were. Education outreaches alone are not actually enough to educate most people, because most people do not have your level of intelligence or philosophical interest, and they will only be convinced by two things:

• Social proof that libertarians are not crazy: For emotional reasons and a desire for acceptance, people groupthink and look to group consensus for guidance on how they should think. They can adopt and understand logical arguments, but only if they've already decided to let them in...and until they see us as a "winning team," most people will fear rejection from the pack too much to give us that kind of hearing.
• Firsthand concrete examples of minarchy working for an extended period of time, after which it's easier to make the mental leap to even less of a state.

 

[jbauer]

baaahh,

That single mom is collecting food stamps, rent, transportation, healthcare, cell phone and utilities. She's already making more then me. I don't give a darn about her.

 

[DamianTV]

The only time I believe a Vote is Wasted is when a person refuses to vote for the Candidate they support because they feel their candidate cant win. Those people completely fail to realize that is exactly why their supported candidate will lose.