The argument that has been presented to me is that voting legitimizes an illegitimate regime. Not voting toppled Apartheid in South Africa. See the article, "You've Got to Stop Voting" below.
Candidates are selected before they are elected.
Dylan Ratigan has stated that 196 individuals contribute 80% of the money in the nominating process guaranteeing that their interests are well represented. Participating in a lie is a waste of energy. He offers as an alternative to get involved on changing infrastructure at a local level:
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You've Got to Stop Voting - by Mark E. Smith (Link)
(This article was edited and updated on April 8, 2012)
The most common activist strategies, such as street demonstrations, protests, etc., rarely seem to bring about any change in government. There is only one nonviolent tactic that has been proven to work. Recently I asked the new president of a local activist group that had banned me from speaking, if I would be allowed to speak under the new leadership. I explained that I'm an election boycott advocate. The reply I got was:
"So
my question is - how does NOT voting change anything? I can see
actually writing in someone you believe in - but not voting simply is
giving up."
I decided to answer the question as
thoroughly as I could. Here's what I wrote, which I'm posting here with
the person's name removed:
South
Africa endured many years of violence under the Apartheid regime. Many
people and countries worldwide boycotted Apartheid, but the US
government insisted on supporting the Apartheid regime, saying that
while the US abhorred Apartheid, the regime was the legitimate
government of South Africa. Then the Apartheid regime held another
election. No more than 7% of South Africans voted. Suddenly everything
changed. No longer could the US or anyone else say that the Apartheid
regime had the consent of the governed. That was when the regime began
to make concessions. Suddenly the ANC, formerly considered to be a
terrorist group trying to overthrow a legitimate government, became
freedom fighters against an illegitimate government. It made all the
difference in the world, something that decades more of violence could
never have done.
In
Cuba, when Fidel Castro's small, ragged, tired band were in the
mountains, the dictator Batista held an election (at the suggestion of
the US, by the way). Only 10% of the population voted. Realizing that he
had lost the support of 90% of the country, Batista fled. Castro then,
knowing that he had the support of 90% of the country, proceeded to
bring about a true revolution.
In
Haiti, when the US and US-sponsored regimes removed the most popular
party from the ballot, in many places only 3% voted. The US had to
intervene militarily, kidnap Aristide, and withhold aid after the
earthquake to continue to control Haiti, but nobody familiar with the
situation thought that the US-backed Haitian government had the consent
of the governed or was legitimate.
Boycotting elections alone will not oust the oligarchy, but it is the only proven non-violent way to delegitimize a government.
A
lot of people here are complaining about the Citizens United decision.
Some want to amend the Constitution because there is no appeal from a
Supreme Court decision (their edicts have the same weight as the Divine
Right of Kings), but getting enough states to ratify is a long drawn out
and not always successful process, as I'm sure you recall from the ERA.
But suppose that the corporations spent ten to fifteen billion dollars
on an election (they spent at least five billion on the last midterms,
so that's not unreasonable) and almost nobody voted. Do you think their
boards of directors would let them do it again?
Here are some of the most common canards that political party operatives use to argue against not voting:
1. Not voting is doing nothing.
When
you vote, you are granting your consent of the governed. That's what
voting is all about. If you knowingly vote for people you can't hold
accountable, it means that you don't really care what they do once
they're in office. All you care about is your right to vote, not whether
or not you will actually be represented or if the government will
secure your rights. Prior to the '08 election, when Obama had already
joined McCain in supporting the bailouts that most people opposed, and
had expressed his intention to expand the war in Afghanistan, I begged
every progressive peace activist I knew not to vote for bailouts and
war. They didn't care and they voted for Obama anyway. That's apathy.
But it's worse than that. Once I had learned how rigged our elections
are, I started asking election integrity activists if they would still
vote if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet.
About half just laughed and said that of course they wouldn't. But the
other half got indignant and accused me of trying to take away their
precious right to vote. When I finished asking everyone I could, I ran
an online poll and got the same results. Half of all voters really are
so apathetic that they don't care if their vote is flushed down a
toilet, as long as they can vote. They really don't know the difference
between a voice in government, and an uncounted or miscounted,
unverifiable vote for somebody they can't hold accountable. They never
bothered to find out what voting is supposed to be about and yet they
think that they're not apathetic because they belong to a political
party and vote.
10. If you don't vote, you're helping the other party.
No, *you* are. By voting for an opposition party, a third party, an independent, or even writing in None of the Above, Nobody, Mickey Mouse, your own name, or yo mama, you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins, not by the candidate you voted for. If there is a 50% turnout, the winning candidate can claim that 50% of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance.
11. If we don't vote, our votes will never be counted and we'll have no leverage.
True, if we don't vote, our votes will never be counted. But how does hoping that our votes *might* *sometimes* be counted, provide leverage? The election just held in the UK had only a 32% turnout. Where people did vote at all, since UK votes actually have to be counted, they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties (George Galloway's Respect Party for one, the Pirate Party for another) and in Edinburgh, a guy who ran dressed as a penguin, calling himself Professor Pongoo, got more votes than leading major party candidates. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
12. The choice is bullets or ballots, so it's a no-brainer.
The Department of Homeland Security has just used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted, to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens. Your ballots authorized those bullets. There is a third option: not voting, not fighting, but simply withholding our consent. That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesn't represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed. It is a legal, nonviolent, effective option called noncompliance. Noncompliance can take other forms, such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems, but these cannot delegitimize a government. Since governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us.
13. Evil people are spending millions of dollars on voter suppression to deny minorities the vote, and people have fought and died for the right to vote, so the vote must be valuable.
Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote. While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation, they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets. If they didn't want people to vote, those proportions would be reversed and they'd be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote. Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them, their uncounted, unverifiable votes for oligarchs who won't represent them, must be valuable.
If
you're doing something wrong, or something that is self-destructive or
hurting others, stopping might be a good idea. If delegating your power
to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in the devastation of
your economy, do you really want to keep doing it? If granting your
authority to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in wars
based on lies that have killed over a million innocent people, do you
really want to keep doing it? If granting your consent of the governed
to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in government
operating on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy instead of on
behalf of the people, do you really want to keep doing it?
2. If we don't vote the bad guys will win.
We've
been voting. When did the good guys win? Besides, it is often hard to
tell the good guys from the bad guys. Suppose Gore had won, and then
died of a heart attack. Do you think the Democrats who voted for him
would have been happy with Joe Lieberman as President? Besides, Gore
actually did win the popular vote. The Supreme Court stopped the vote
count and put Bush in office. So just because the good guys win doesn't
mean that they get to take office. Kerry also won the popular vote, but
before anyone could finish counting the votes, he had to break both his
promises, that he wouldn't concede early and that he would ensure that
every vote was counted, in order to get the bad guy back in office
again. Our Constitution was written to ensure that those who owned the
country would always rule it, so the popular vote can be overruled by
the Electoral College, Congress, the Supreme Court, or by the winning
candidate conceding, and is not the final say. Even if we had accurate,
verifiable vote counts, and everyone who voted, voted for a good guy, it
doesn't mean that good guy could take office unless the Electoral
College, Congress, and the Supreme Court allowed it. Even then, the good
guy might fear that the Security State might assassinate him they way
they killed JFK, and either concede or stop being a good guy in order to
survive. The Supreme Court, of course, has the Constitutional power to
intervene on any pretext, and its decisions, no matter how
unconstitutional, irrational, unprecedented, or even downright insane,
can not be appealed, so they do have the final say.
3. If you don't vote, you can't complain.
What
good does complaining do? When successive administrations of both
parties tell you that they will not allow public opinion to influence
policy decisions, you can complain all you want and it won't do you any
good. But you don't need to vote to have the right to complain. The
Declaration of Independence is a long list of complaints against a king
by colonists who were not allowed to vote. The right to gripe is one of
those unalienable rights that is not granted by governments or kings. If
you're treated unjustly, you have the right to complain. A lot of
people who voted for Obama are now angry with his policies and are
complaining loudly. He couldn't care less.
4. It is a citizen's responsibility and civic duty to vote.
Only
if the government holding the election has secured your civil and human
rights. If it has not, if it has instead become destructive of your
civil and human rights, "...it is the Right of the People to alter or to
abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on
such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." —Declaration of
Independence
5. Your vote is your voice in government.
In
a democratic form of government it would be. In a democratic form of
government, such as a direct or participatory democracy, people can vote
on things like budgets, wars, and other important issues, and have a
voice in government. In our "representative" government, people can only
vote for representatives who may or may not listen to them or act in
their interests, and who cannot be held accountable during their terms
of office, which is the only time they hold power and are needed to
represent the interests of their constituents. Waiting until somebody
has killed a million people in a war based on lies, destroyed the
economy, and taken away your civil rights, and then trying to elect
somebody else, is much too late because by then much of the damage
cannot be undone and your grandchildren will still be paying for it.
6.
Just because things didn't work out the way we wanted last time, and
the time before that, and the time before that, doesn't mean that they
won't this time.
Some say that Einstein defined insanity as repeating the same experiment over and over and expecting different results.
7. If we don't vote, the Tea Party, the Breivik-types, and all the lunatics will, and they'll run the country.
They're
a minority, no more than 10% at the very most. Of the approximately 50%
of our electorate that votes, fewer than 10% vote for 3rd parties. The
Apartheid regime in South Africa tried to seat the winning candidates
after a successful election boycott where there was only a 7% turnout,
but nobody thought they were legitimate or took them seriously.
8. You don't have the numbers to pull off an election boycott.
There
are already more people who don't vote, who either don't think our
government is relevant to them, don't think their vote matters, or don't
think that anyone on the ballot would represent them or could, since
anyone who represented the people would be a small minority with no
seniority in government, than there are registered Democrats or
Republicans. We have greater numbers than either major party, but they
haven't given up so why should we?
9. People who don't vote are apathetic.
10. If you don't vote, you're helping the other party.
No, *you* are. By voting for an opposition party, a third party, an independent, or even writing in None of the Above, Nobody, Mickey Mouse, your own name, or yo mama, you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins, not by the candidate you voted for. If there is a 50% turnout, the winning candidate can claim that 50% of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance.
11. If we don't vote, our votes will never be counted and we'll have no leverage.
True, if we don't vote, our votes will never be counted. But how does hoping that our votes *might* *sometimes* be counted, provide leverage? The election just held in the UK had only a 32% turnout. Where people did vote at all, since UK votes actually have to be counted, they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties (George Galloway's Respect Party for one, the Pirate Party for another) and in Edinburgh, a guy who ran dressed as a penguin, calling himself Professor Pongoo, got more votes than leading major party candidates. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
12. The choice is bullets or ballots, so it's a no-brainer.
The Department of Homeland Security has just used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted, to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens. Your ballots authorized those bullets. There is a third option: not voting, not fighting, but simply withholding our consent. That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesn't represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed. It is a legal, nonviolent, effective option called noncompliance. Noncompliance can take other forms, such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems, but these cannot delegitimize a government. Since governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us.
13. Evil people are spending millions of dollars on voter suppression to deny minorities the vote, and people have fought and died for the right to vote, so the vote must be valuable.
Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote. While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation, they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets. If they didn't want people to vote, those proportions would be reversed and they'd be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote. Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them, their uncounted, unverifiable votes for oligarchs who won't represent them, must be valuable.
--Mark
(Items #10, #11, and #12 were added on 5/5/2012, #13 on 5/8/2012, and were not sent with the original email)
I waited a couple of days, and when I got no response, wrote to ask why. This was the answer:
"I
did not respond because I have nothing to add to your excellent
feedback - one way or the other. All valid arguments for your case. But
most of us, and I do admit to including myself, do not act on reason -
we act on gut. That sort of makes you a lonely person? But courageous
nonetheless. Keep speaking out."
In other words,
it is saying that I'm right, but since it makes people feel
uncomfortable, I still won't be allowed to speak. I have been speaking
out for six years, but since most organizations are in some way
political party, candidate, or electoral issue related, they will not
allow me a forum. In fact, most activist organizations are non-profit
corporations themselves, so when they claim to be opposing corporate
rule or specific corporate actions, it appears that they have an
inherent conflict of interest.
Election Boycott News
Submitted by folkie on 19 November 2012 - 9:47am.
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Update:
Boycott Corporatocracy! Boycott Corrupt Elections!Consent of The Governed - Why You Should Vote