Why I Won't Vote

The U.S. electoral system is thoroughly rigged and corrupt

I will not vote in this presidential election.

It’s not just because I consider genocide a deal-breaker and refuse to choose between the clowns and criminals offered up by the duopoly. It’s not a matter of withholding my vote because there’s no acceptable candidate.  It’s a matter of a prior, prerequisite problem: whether, as a citizen, to withhold a vote because the lack of integrity of the electoral process makes a mockery of casting it. 

I’ve written about my thoughts on voting in presidential elections in previous electoral cycles, and I’m going to draw on those previous essays here. Please go to the links below to see a fuller version of my position, with many more references.

As I said in my last essay on this election:

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College. It is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

There’s a fundamental fact of our election system that undermines all the standard ways we consider electoral strategies. With the proliferation of electronic voting machines and computerized tabulation systems, the electoral process is not only corrupted by all the influences leftists consistently criticize—the financial control of the plutocracy, media bias, unfair ballot laws, voter caging and suppression tactics, the two-party duopoly, etc.—it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense: it gives the voter no reasonable assurance, and no way of ever knowing, that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought s/he did. 

I can certainly understand the desire to vote for Jill Stein in this election, both in order to advance the third-party possibility by reaching the 5% threshold and to make Kamala and the Democrats lose—and know they lost—because of their support of the Gaza genocide. But that only works if your vote for Jill Stein is counted for Jill Stein.

It is foolish to ignore how electronic voting systems affect what third-party voting might actually accomplish. Third-party votes are no longer just brave markers of political dissidence; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 5% to 2%, and Kamala or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory.

The wishful thinking of leftists about third-party voting in the present corrupt system was never more clearly stated than in David Lindorff’s  2016 essay in which he acknowledges that “American voters cannot really expect their votes to be honestly counted in the end,” and then says to vote for Jill Stein. So, Vote for Jill Stein even though your vote may be counted for Kamala Harrs.

That is not a serious leftist political strategy. We have to get away from it. We have to face how deeply rigged—how far beyond being affected by third-party votes—the system is

To “get” what this means, if you haven’t seen it already, you must watch this excerpt from Hacking Democracy. In it, an optical-scan machine that Diebold executives testified, and election officials firmly believed, could not be hacked, is easily breached in front of those flabbergasted election workers—reducing one woman to tears, as she says, fully understanding what it means about American democracy: “It’s as though our country is one country pretending to be another country.”

We have one election pretending to be another. And third parties are now part of the pretense. We have to face it and reject it.  Our first objective should not be to make some bold dissident move that can be used against us in the rigged electoral game, but to change the game. Or, as the enduring wisdom of 80s movies has it: Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

That documentary was made ten years ago. The problem has only gotten worse. Leftists used to be all over the critique of this (See all the references in my linked essays.) until, of course, Trump. There’s no worse effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome than its lobotomizing of the leftist mind’s ability to think about the possibility of election fraud.

Here’s a reprise of what I said in a 2020 essay:

Voting in the present system is like sitting down at a poker table where you have no reasonable assurance that there are 52 cards in the deck, and where the dealer will count the chips and allocate them to the players behind a screen. Sitting at that table is not a sign of how much you value your money/vote, but of how willing you are to waste it. The only thing you achieve at that table is to give credibility to a game that has none. And the only reason you would sit at that table, knowing all this, is because you want to believe in its credibility, too. As in all confidence games, it’s the mark’s own credulity that gets him taken.

And if the dealer is spending as much money and energy as the plutocracy does to get you to sit at that table, it must be because the plutocracy really does need that sanction of credibility from you. That is what they are paying $15.9 billion for. That, therefore, is the one power you have in the electoral system. And the most effective way to use it in the current system is to withhold it.  Under present conditions, withholding one’s vote is the one thing one can do – with one’s vote, within electoral politics – that would not waste the vote, and that could make a significant difference.  

Those who say: “Your presence at the polls is what they fear most,” have it backwards. It is our absence, en masse, from the polls that the ruling plutocracy fears most. They fear their inability to plausibly claim that they rule with the consent of the governed. They fear that the system they build and sustain will be recognized and rejected as undemocratic by its own citizenry. What’s going to shake the system more: If Jill Stein gets 5% of the vote in a few states, or if the percentage of voters drops to 35% or 25% nationally? With images on television of voters around the country signing a boycott pledge? I think Joel Hirschhorn got it exactly right when he said that: “The whole world would interpret that as the rejection by Americans of their political system.  It would be an incredible historic shock having the potential to remove the legitimacy and credibility of the current two-party duopoly.  Our corrupt, delusional democracy would have received a bullet.”

I know something else is possible, because I’ve seen it. In 2006, I sat in a classroom polling station in Ramallah, and watched the vote count for the Palestinian elections. The poll worker, a teacher at the school, opened the ballot boxes in front of representatives of every party, showing every person each hand-marked ballot. If there was an incorrectly or ambiguously marked ballot, everyone saw it, and all the party representatives gave their opinion about how to count it. If there had been disagreement about how to count a ballot, it would have been set aside. There was agreement about every one. It took as much time as it took. There was no rush, but on that small scale it was done by evening.  At the end of this process, the result was posted on the door of the classroom for everybody to see. There was no doubt about the outcome.

In the midst of this process, the woman sitting next to me, representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said to me something like: “You must think we are so backward here, counting votes one by one like this. I’m sure you have a more advanced system in America.” From the hole I was crawling into in my mind, I replied: “I’ve sat through two presidential elections in the United States in the past six years, and I still don’t know who actually won them. I know, without a doubt, who won here. Please understand: It is I who is learning from you.”

Every member of the election observation team agreed it was the most honest election they had ever seen. Unlike the previous Palestinian election in 1996, where the ballots were collected from the precincts by an Israeli army van which drove them to a central counting site. A couple of us actually followed the van around town as it collected the ballots, but who knows what happened inside the van? Who knows what happens inside the computer?

The two lessons learned (besides the one about how our government has no lessons about democracy to export to anybody, and, oh yeah, the one about “the only democracy in the Middle East”) were: 1) You can have a trustworthy democratic election if you want to, and 2) The simpler the better. The hand-marked paper ballot, hand-counted in the polling station, is the gold standard for a democratic election. There should be nothing hidden or proprietary. If you want transparency and trust, leave the video screen for games and use video cameras to live-stream every element of the balloting and counting process. If the votes are not counted on the spot before ballots are moved anywhere, in front of observers from the candidates and the public, with the result immediately recorded and displayed, it’s a good bet there’s a scam in progress.

Our electoral system needs to be made transparent and democratic before we participate in it, as a condition of our participation. The complex, inconsistent, and opaque American electoral system that is designed to enable undetectable fraud makes it inevitable that there will be challenges after elections. Fixing it would not be hard, but it would require good-faith work between elections that politicians of both parties refuse to do. They prefer picking on the elements of the electoral system they think will benefit them the most, and allowing/encouraging the divisive fights after elections that center on and perpetuate the duopoly fake feud.

In my 2020 essay, I analogized the citizen’s vote to the worker’s labor-power, and made the point that, even in the capitalist context, the worker can sell his/her labor-power with dignity and integrity as long as s/he gets a decent wage. But not for a penny a day, and not if you know you might get cheated out of even that. Such insulting conditions call for an exercise of the one economic power you have as a worker: a strike. Similarly, a citizen can vote with integrity in any election, as long as s/he has a reasonable certainty that his/her vote will be counted for whom it was cast. But without that minimal assurance the only self-respecting thing to do with your vote, the only thing that respects its value and exercises its power, is to withhold it.

Our vote is our power. Use it by boycotting the election.

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Previous related essays:

https://thepolemicist.substack.com/p/strike-vote

https://www.thepolemicist.net/2016/06/bernies-end.html

https://www.thepolemicist.net/2012/11/election-choices-what-to-do-instead.html

https://thepolemicist.substack.com/p/the-american-farce-unravels-shreds

https://thepolemicist.substack.com/p/prime-directive-trust-system-blame

https://www.thepolemicist.net/2016/09/primeddirective-trust-system-blame.html

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