As of this writing, Genocide Joe’s off the ticket, Kamala’s still basking in an early-campaign halo, and we’re at the tail end, god willing, of a truly terrible Discourse about her recently-announced running mate Tim Walz being our, um, collective Great White Father. The 2024 election threatened to be a tragicomic metaphor for imperial decline as the former host of The Apprentice faced off against the shambling, quasi-animate corpse of the author of the 1994 crime law. With the installation of Kamala and Walz, it is once again a Contest for Democracy and the Future of Our Country.
This is why, in left-of-center circles, I’m supposed to feel guilty about confessing that I won’t be voting this fall. It’s nothing personal: I’ve never voted in an election, federal, state, or local, though I’ve been eligible to do so for well over a decade. I’ve never registered to vote. I’ve never been inside a voting booth, though I’ve seen them in movies.
Now it’d make sense that my decision to not vote—as with, quite frankly, a great majority of decisions I’ve made in my life—would upset the red-blooded, flag-waving, dyed-in-the-wool American patriots among us. The interesting thing is that people on the left have the same knee-jerk reaction.
The United States has always been very proud of its electoral system, all the way back to when the franchise was limited to white, property-owning male genocidaires leeching off a hellish plantation empire ruled by a man whose mouth was filled with the teeth he harvested from living people he’d enslaved. Leftists generally recognize that a direct line runs from the white supremacist, genocide state of the 18th century through to the white supremacist, genocide state ruling the contemporary US. This is the meaning of structural or systemic oppression: that systems of power left to their own devices endure beyond the presidential term or lifespan of a single “bad apple.” The whole damn system is, indeed, guilty as hell.
There are many, many people who agree with everything in the preceding paragraph but still recoil, violently, at the thought of electoral abstention. I want to be clear: I’m not saying that the differences between any two candidates are unimportant. I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter to me whether a politician institutes a Muslim ban, criminalizes abortion, or escalates a genocidal military campaign because I am not an irredeemable ghoul. What I’m saying is that you can’t actually do a damn thing about any of that by voting.
That’s because your individual vote is useless. Not in the sense that “the politicians are all the same” or anything like that (more on that later). No, I mean “useless” in the most elementary, literal, everyday sense of the word. The election will not come down to the vote of a single member of the electoral college whose district is decided by a single ballot. In the absence of such a monumentally unlikely occurrence, your vote will not cause the election to turn out differently than it would have had you stayed home.
Folks more arithmetically inclined that I am have run the numbers and calculated that the odds of your vote counting in a presidential race are in fact roughly one in 60 million. In fact, you have roughly the same odds of dying in a car crash on the way to vote as you do of having your vote matter, given the average distance to a polling location and per-mile fatality rate in the US.
This, of course, is only true for presidential elections at the national level. We know that a minuscule number of crucial swing districts actually decide presidential races, though somehow this isn’t seen as a damning indictment of the American system. And the odds of actually mattering are much higher for state or local races. But the point stands that none of these contests are ever expected to come down to a single vote, and the smaller races you’re more likely to influence are also those for which you don’t have enough information to make an “informed choice” between the candidates. (I dare you to tell me, without looking it up, the duties of a comptroller or county commissioner.)
And this is why the narrative that voting is “harm reduction” drives me up the wall. Voting isn’t harm reduction because things that don’t effect outcomes don’t reduce harm. Giving out Narcan is harm reduction because it reverses opiate overdoses. An individual dose can save someone’s life. An individual vote has objectively no effect on the outcome of an election. Voting is “harm reduction” like giving drug users expired packs of hot dogs and plastic kazoos instead of Narcan.
Now, if your vote isn’t going to matter, your not voting isn’t going to matter, either, though it may reduce your risk of an automobile fatality. But there’s a puzzle here. Think of all the forms of “civic engagement” you might participate in—eloquent letters to the editor! earnest petitions! impassioned emails to your Senator (or at least their summer intern)! Why does the US regime tell its subjects that their solemn civic duty is to civically engage in the least effective way?
Casting a vote is an endorsement of a chosen candidate. But it’s also a tacit endorsement of the position in question. Let’s say your nemesis gets voted most likeable for the high school yearbook. If you throw a fit when the results are announced, and object that the idea of voting someone most likeable is rotten and we ought to throw the whole thing out, it’d be a pretty compelling retort if I showed that you’d been voting alongside the rest of us, just for a different losing candidate. You played the game the same as anyone else, you’re just a sore loser. Better luck next year!
Similarly, voting for the president implies that somebody will, by virtue of democratic procedure, enjoy four years as the legitimate president, the rightful head honcho of the federal Bureau of Prisons, the ATF and CIA and FBI, migrant detention centers and foreign military bases and the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. Here’s the thing: I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think any of those things should exist. Every vote for president is a vote for the things that presidents do. And I don’t think any of us have any business giving even the smallest shred of legitimacy to the person who will assume that role.
And while there are real differences between the parties, there’s a strong bipartisan consensus on number of truly ghastly horrors, any of which should disqualify a political system from receiving even a modicum of our support. An immigration policy designed to push migrants to die of heat or cold or exposure in the desert expanses between heavily-patrolled border crossings. Unrestrained support for the Israeli war of elimination. A global system of extraction and exploitation that robs the wealth of the global periphery and feeds parasitically on oppressed communities within its very own borders.
I think these things are bad. I think volunteering to vote for the person you’d like to see in charge of administering them is actually pretty shameful. I think leftists voting in American elections are dishonest at best and ideologically abetting human catastrophes at worst.
I am well aware that if a bunch of people don’t vote, then whoever does show up will still get to pick the victor. But I think the principled way to confront an exploitative system is to consciously, actively encourage as much withdrawal from that system as possible. If only 10% of eligible voters showed up ton November 5th, it wouldn’t matter that they alone would determine the winner because with those turnout numbers, the regime would be sure to fall before “Thanksgiving.”
I don’t think that’s what’s in store for this autumn, but I do think we need to be serious about building transformational, oppositional organizing cultures and drawing some damn lines in the sand. I don’t think we should be ashamed of withdrawing support for an oppressive system. I don’t think we should let reformist, lesser-evil politics get covered up with a radical, harm reduction veneer. I don’t think participating in the electoral system pushes politicians to the left. I think it pushes our movements out of the streets.
You don’t have to agree with me; I’m not the not-voting police. And again, if a vote doesn’t have an impact, its absence doesn’t, either. But I’d love to have a conversation about the benefits and risks of engaging even tactically with the electoral system here in the imperial core. Let’s imagine the joy and trouble we can spark once our political imaginaries are un-tethered from their voting booths.
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This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.