Anti-voting

Anti-voting is an existing philosophy about why voting under systems with particular qualities is an irrational form of action that has no efficient means of influencing actual decision-makers and power-brokers, the policies they implement and the resulting society that is shaped by said policies and practices.

Anti-voting members are not against the democratic possibility, but instead, disillusioned that an existing one is truly what it claims to be. They often argue that they are more for democracy than the voting public that they feel participates in a system that is fallacious logically and creates a passive sense of accomplishment that is instead empty of power, empty of any direct influence on general social decision making.

Members of the part of the population who find these ideas to be most true often cause strong and emotional reactions in voting publics, and are accused of apathy, nihilism, pessimism and passivity. They are also accused of invoking in those who believe in the religion of blind voting resulting hopelessness, depression and suicidal ideation.

Argument

One form of argument focuses on the lack of openness in certain systems, a locking out of a minority or disenfranchised part of the population:

My second reason for not voting is that it's a waste of time because the outcome of the election is rigged anyway. By "rigged" I don't mean that the actual victor is chosen in advance or that the figures are fabricated or that the ballots are mishandled (though that did happen in 1960) but just that the Republicrat machinery is so powerful that all rivals are effectively excluded; for certain in practice, the winner WILL be either Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee. Example: in St Louis, rivals Badnarik and Cobb attempted to enter the debate building to serve legal papers on the Debate Commission to protest their exclusion from the debates; but they were promptly arrested. ^[1]

Other argument centers around the innate corruption of the political process whereby only a small minority of the public functions as decision makers, decision makers who are strongly influenced by non-political processes such as big lobbying by organizations interested in marketing and profits, and other forces that are geared towards military ends:

All voting systems involving choosing a candidate, no matter how well-designed and fair the system is, suffer from the same flaw: they end up electing a politician. [1]

Or:

My fourth reason for not voting is that voting is immoral because by participating in a thoroughly immoral system, the voter endorses it. A friend of mine used to wave at polling booths on Election Day the banner "THIS IS A DEN OF CRIMINALS" and although strictly speaking he was wrong because the criminals have defined "crime" as only an act of disobedience to one of their laws, his point was clear enough.

Still another approach to this philosophy of voting protest centers about the control of the physical and technical voting machinery:

We all know by now the folly of current election technologies from Premier and Sequoia Voting DRE (Direct Record Electronic) systems as well as some of the new, more promising systems on the horizon such as the open source OVC (Open Voting Consortium) and Scantegrity. The question of whether we can do better will be raised. What needs to be done to make this process better than it is today? Both software and hardware methods to secure the ballot box will be discussed [2] [3].

One last form of argument claims that elections that are already determined by the preferences and preconditions of a frame of population presents a lack of motivation for a single voter, since their personal participation presents a very low probability of any effect in the vote's outcome. E.g., U.S. states that have been strongly Democratic for one hundred years will likely stay that way, statistically speaking, despite any individual actions. Only an unlikely catastrophic event, a type of deus ex machina, would cause a case that was otherwise. This people often argue for and participate in local elections, whereby their significance is relevant and influential.

References

^ Five Reasons Not to Vote

External links

[1] Five Reasons Not to Vote

[1]

Argument

See also

References

External links