Yes, it’s that time of year when I begin my annual campaign to discourage people from voting. Of course, it never works, but no one can say I didn’t try.
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What is the ballot? It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the billy, and the bullet. It is a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable. The voice of the majority saves bloodshed, but it is no less the arbitrament of force than is the decree of the most absolute of despots backed by the most powerful of armies.
~ Benjamin R. Tucker
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“The media priesthood has already begun the chant: if there is something wrong with the political system, we need to go to the polls to fix the problem. One of the media stalwarts has his own solution: “go to the polls and vote out every incumbent.” Don’t dare consider, of course, that there may be something fundamentally dysfunctional about the system itself. If drinking a quart of Scotch each day has given you cirrhosis of the liver, don’t bother with changing your habits, just change to another brand of Scotch!”
–Butler Shaffer
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“By voting, it is clear that each voter endorses the governmental system under which he or she lives. By the act of voting, each voter is saying: It is right and proper for some people, acting in the name of the State, to pass laws and to use violence to compel obedience to those laws if they are not obeyed.”
–Carl Watner
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“Even in these circumstances, however, I would still refuse to vote against Hitler. Why? Because the essential problem is not Hitler, but the institutional framework that allows a Hitler to grasp a monopoly on power. Without the state to back him up and an election to give him legitimized power, Hitler would have been–at most–the leader of some ragged thugs who mugged people in back alleys. Voting for or against Hitler would only strengthen the institutional framework that produced him–a framework that would produce another of his ilk in two seconds.”
–Wendy McElroy
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“Look at it this way. If voting could threaten the ruling establishment, do you really think They’d work to make registration and voting easier and easier every time? Would They really be so insistent on everyone’s voting every Election Day, even unto Mama and Gramps and all the Urdu-speaking tramps? Now look at it from the other end of the telescope. Why do you suppose They are so insistent?”
–Nicholas Strakon
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“Voting doesn’t seem to carry the same kind of risk other political acts do, acts such as standing up and bearing witness, spurning leviathan’s bribes, telling truth to Power, ostracizing servants of the regime, or unfurling a banner of defiance. Just as libertarians strive to show people the actual costs of government, including the costs of projects such as its incessant wars, we should strive to show people the actual costs of voting. Libertarians should tell those likely to fall victim to voting that, although voting cannot earn the rewards of more honest, full-blooded political acts, it does entail serious risk: risk to themselves — to their character — to their self-respect. Voting is an apathetic bow of obeisance to their rulers.”
–Nicholas Strakon
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“When we express a preference politically, we do so precisely because we intend to bind others to our will. Political voting is the legal method we have adopted and extolled for obtaining monopolies of power. Political voting is nothing more than the assumption that might makes right. There is a presumption that any decision wanted by the majority of those expressing a preference must be desirable, and the inference even goes so far as to presume that anyone who differs from a majority view is wrong or possibly immoral.”
–Robert LeFevre
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“[Voters] may feel like victims now and then, but it is their system and their policies and they support it by voting. Voters are the people who effectively maintain political power over society and thereby over you. Even though you, being a non-voter, have nothing to do with their system and don’t support it in any way, they claim the right to force you to comply with whatever rules they see fit. It is ‘democratic,’ you see. They vote and decide what to do with your life and your property; they say it is ‘freedom,’ and in a way it is – their freedom to force you to comply with their rules.”
–Per Bylund
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“The very act of pulling a lever, or writing an ‘X’, or punching out a chad, is an act of violence against our fellow humans; it is an act which says, for a common example, ‘I know full well that I have no right to steal my neighbor’s money to pay for my child’s education, so I want you, Ms Candidate, to go do it for me’.”
–Jim Davies
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“The United States of course is not a democracy but a wonderfully crafted pretense. We have separated the results of elections from the formulation of policy. It is a neat trick: Voting distracts the rabble without disturbing the government. You cannot possibly—can you?—believe that your vote will change anything of importance? That it will end the flood of semi-literate Mexican proletarians who join our own? Divert the schools from their ghettoish apotheosis of the mentally lame and halt? Cause governmental behavior to rely on merit instead of race, creed, color, sex, and national origin?”
– Fred Reed
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“So all of you voters out there, you who believe that you have the right to pass laws (laws are things which ‘authorize’ enforcement by the police), just remember that, at the very least, you are the equivalent to those in that bar room who were cheering on the rapists. You may not have the guts to just go out there and take what you want by force, but you can ‘get your rocks off’ by cheering on those brutal enough to violate others with your support.”
–a.k.a. NonEntity
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“My Hoppean secession from party politics isn’t an abandonment of the battle for liberty. On the contrary: It’s redeployment to the front lines. Freedom can’t be achieved through politics. Voting can’t build liberty any more than flapping our arms can make us fly. And as Lew Rockwell has pointed out, the whole idea of “public policy” is an anti-liberty fraud. The fields where freedom will be won are philosophical and ethical . . . mental and moral . . . personal, not political.”
–Andrew Rogers
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“Hitler was among the least likely of individuals to rise to power when he did. He was unimposing, a poor student, flat broke, and a failed painter. He lived like a bum for months on the streets of Vienna and he had no special gifts, other than an ability to speak in public. If not for the NSDAP, he would have gone nowhere. It was a political party that enabled Hitler to rise to power.”
–Joe Blow
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“Voting, in other words, is the primary holy sacrament of initiation into the cult of power worship. We are all supplicants to this religion. Each and every time we imbibe the ritual, drinking deeply of the chalice of power-lust, we murder just a little bit more of our own soul, sacrificing it gradually but inexorably, to the God whose name we dare not speak.”
–Greg Gauthier
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“Every vote for the president is wasted. The system is corrupt. Stay home and exercise your freedom as a human being to not vote for he who will oppress you. Nothing will ever improve until you wake up. Your life is not owned by those who lay claim to it.”
– Jeff Langr
—“The more people that participate in murder and theft, the thinner the blame is spread. One man who kills is branded a murderer, but one million who kill in unison are hailed as citizens. A single thief can be stopped with locks, but what of ten thousand thieves, with the power of your own sanction behind them? How does participating in organized theft prevent you from being robbed? After claiming power over the property of others, how can you complain when they exercise the same power over you?”
–John Lopez
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“We must repudiate the fundamental idea of politics: that our lives are not our own, but belong instead to whoever gains political power. We have to defeat the means, not the man. Refusing to participate in politics denies our enemies a powerful weapon–our own moral sanction of our enslavement and murder.”
–John Lopez
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“Far from being a means of demonstrating my commitment to the ideals of constitutional government, my vote has become an excuse used by the minions of our corrupt system to continue their evil. Voting implies that one will abide by the decision of the majority, even when one’s own side fails to gain victory. When you or I vote today we are broadcasting to the vermin infesting our system that we will follow their orders and directives, despite the unlawful nature of their actions. To vote is to place our stamp of legitimacy on the corruption of American legal and political principles. I will no longer do so.”
–Patrick Martin
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“But it is the anarchists who, for well over a century, have been the most consistent advocates of conscientiously staying away from the poll. Since anarchism implies an aspiration for a decentralised non-governmental society, it makes no sense from an anarchist point of view to elect representatives to form a central government. If you want no government, what is the point of listening to the promises of a better government? As Thoreau put it: ‘Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.’“
– Colin Ward
