But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, iv)
In the United States, today is Election Day. We’ve been putting up with partisan idiocy for over a year now, and for the past few months it’s become intolerable: normal election years are bad enough, but presidential election years are a kind of evil circus which turns even normal people who pay too much attention to it into raving lunatics. And the worst part of it? Despite the mindless glorification of their own candidate and equally-mindless vilification of the other, the modern US presidential elections have about as much impact on the future of the country as choosing a new color of paint for one’s house. Don’t believe me? Then please explain why every president going back to Reagan, no matter what his campaign rhetoric, mostly continued the policies of his predecessor once he got in the White House. My husband says he imagines that on the evening of inauguration day, the new president goes into the Oval Office alone and meets with a mysterious old man in a gray suit who puts a binder on his desk and explains for the next six hours or so exactly how things are going to be.
This is the main reason I don’t vote. In a republic, the electorate chooses representatives to act on its behalf; by participating in the system, each voter agrees to abide by the results of the process and tacitly acknowledges that the leaders so elected (and by extension the underlings they appoint and the bureaucrats those underlings hire, including police) have legitimate authority over them.
…In his 1851 book Social Statics, the English radical Herbert Spencer neatly describes the rhetorical jujitsu surrounding voting, consent, and complaint, then demolishes the argument. Say a man votes and his candidate wins. The voter is then “understood to have assented” to the acts of his representative. But what if he voted for the other guy? Well, then, the argument goes, “by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority.” And what if he abstained? “Why then he cannot justly complain…seeing that he made no protest…Curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this.” Indeed.
The chance of any candidate whose views come within 46 parsecs of mine being nominated to the presidency by either faction of the duopoly is so close to zero as to be mathematically indistinguishable from it, and the chance of a third-party candidate being elected in our current system isn’t much higher. Furthermore, even if such a candidate were to be elected to the presidency, the Republicrats wouldn’t allow him to accomplish anything. My vote is therefore not merely worthless, but assigned a negative value; it is worth more to me uncast, as a protest against the current system and as a symbolic rejection of the “authorities” produced by that system. For me, voting has become a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.