If You Refuse to Vote, You're Only Hurting Yourself

The right not to vote

Leo argues that people have a right to refrain from voting. I agree. But having a right to do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should do it, or that it's a good thing to do, or that you should feel proud of yourself for doing it.

I have a perfect right to walk down the street with a sign saying "Kick Me" scotch-taped to my rear end. No one can take that right away from me, and no one should. But it's a stupid thing to do, and it's nothing to be proud of.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.

Not-voting as a way to send a message

Leo writes that refusing to vote is an effective form of protest. I strongly disagree with this. I know that people who don't vote often believe they are making a statement. They appear to believe that by simply staying home from the polls, someone (but who?) will take notice of them and the many others like them, and be inspired to change the system in such a way that it will please the disgruntled non-voters enough to bring them back to the polls.

In my opinion, this will never happen. Political power in this country is gained by appealing to the majority of the actual voters. It doesn't matter if everybody votes, or half the population votes, or only 10% of the people vote. All a politician needs to do to gain power is appeal to the majority of the people who do vote. Candidates can safely ignore the people who stay home.

All that happens when people don't vote is that they give more power to the people who do. If I lived in a town with 1,000 people who were eligible to vote, and all of them did vote, then my vote would only count for 1/1,000th of the outcome. But if three-quarters of the people decided to stay home as a form of passive "protest," then my vote would count for 1/250th of the outcome. The fewer people who vote, the more influence my vote will have.

Many young people don't vote. That transfers their voting power to older voters, who do vote in greater numbers. Is that really what young non-voters want - to have older people making all the decisions?

Leo writes that people are sending a message when they don't vote, a message that they don't believe in the system, the candidates, and the choices they have been given. I think they are mistaken. They may be sending a message, but nobody is receiving it.

In my opinion, trying to send a message in such a passive way is like sulking when you don't get your way in your personal life. People may think they are sending a message by pouting and giving someone the silent treatment, but they may only be annoying the other person, making the other person less, not more, inclined to give them what they want.

It's more effective, in life and in politics, to ask directly for what you want, rather than to withdraw in the hope that someone will come along and rescue you.

The two-party system

Leo writes, "I personally feel that both of our major parties are basically the same; they just spout different sets of lies." He believes that if there were more choices on the ballot, then more people would want to vote.

I believe that having a multi-party system is not a panacea that would cure all our electoral woes. It would solve some problems, but it would also create a whole new set of problems.

In a winner-take-all system like ours, third-party candidates in three-way races can only function as spoilers. A third-party candidate takes away votes from the major candidate who is most like him, and therefore helps the candidate who is most different. So when people vote for a third-party candidate, it has the opposite effect of what they intend.

And then there are multi-party systems, those that may offer far more than three choices. These are appealing, because the more choices you have, the better your chances of finding a candidate who will come close to being exactly what you want. When you have small-party candidates, they don't have to worry about appealing to the masses. They don't have to compromise. They don't have to try to be all things to all people. They can appeal directly to a small niche. And people can vote for them without feeling as if they were holding their noses and voting for the least of the available evils.

That may sound great. But there's a problem. In multi-party systems, the total vote is split among many parties, and each party or candidate will only get a small piece of the pie. So no one has a mandate to rule. The winning party will have to form coalitions with the other parties.

That's how parliamentary systems work. These coalitions are often among strange bedfellows, between parties that may strongly disagree on significant issues. These coalitions are unstable. As soon as one party tries to do something controversial, the coalitions may fall apart.

And in a parliamentary system, when the coalitions fall apart, as they often do, the government itself collapses. Then you see things like prime ministers resigning in the middle of their terms, and/or special elections being called to rebuild the government all over again. It's very chaotic compared to our two-party system, where there is usually a far more orderly transfer of power at regular and predictable intervals.

No system is perfect, not a two-party system, not a three-party system, and not a multi-party parliamentary system. When people refuse to vote simply because the current system is flawed, they are being unrealistic, in my opinion, thinking that the grass would be greener on the other side of the electoral fence, when in reality it might just be different, not better.

Bottom line

It takes a lot to keep a democracy going. Voting is the very least that someone can do, the bare minimum requirement for being a participating member of our experiment in self-rule. When it comes to voting, silence is not golden. It's only silence.