This campaign season has done me in. Here is one voter who will not be casting a vote for your opponent. Nor for you. And I am now to the point where if I were running for office I wouldn’t even vote for myself.  After years duly doing my duty as a citizen in a democracy (we no longer have a Constitutional republic), I have now officially become an ex-voter. I began voting thinking it would make this country better. Then I voted to try to preserve the good things about this country. Then I voted thinking it could change the way things were going. When I saw that wasn’t working, I voted to make a statement. When I realized no one was listening, I voted just because it is a right I thought I should exercise regardless of the fact that nothing, nothing ever changed.  I have finally come to grips with what I have been sensing for a long time: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is, well, you know.

 Please understand, this is absolutely not due to “voter apathy”. I am so not apathetic about this issue. I'm making this decision after deep reflection, study, and conversation with many people whose opinions I respect. Now I'll feel sorry for the people who I’ll see on Election Day wearing those smiley “I Voted!” stickers. People with those stickers are people who have not yet learned that by voting they are endorsing not a candidate that is the lesser of two evils but a system which is evil in itself. A system which places the legal monopoly of the use of lethal force in the hands of what amounts to the biggest gang.

So if, as a voter, my candidates, issues, and belief system carry the day, I get to impose those views on others legally. If they don’t, I get others’ views imposed on me legally. In either case I don’t consider myself a winner. By participating in the voting process I’m endorsing that kind of system. The only way I can make a statement against that kind of system is by not participating in it. Author Thomas Di Lorenzo makes the point that because the American Government has abdicated any responsibility to the Constitutional limitations on the power of government and today blatantly ignores those limitations, it's downright traitorous to vote.

Beyond the principled arguments for abstaining from voting come a multitude of practical ones:
 

• There is no real choice. The two parties, Dumb and Dumber, are so indistinguishable as to be mirror images. The Republicans are growing government faster today than any Democrat of only a few years ago.

• You can't vote for anything important. Did you have the opportunity to vote not to go to war? Can you vote tomorrow to bring the troops home Wednesday? Did you have a say in who was appointed as the new head of the Federal Reserve? To stop printing unbacked currency?  Can you vote to decide how much tax you are forced to pay?  How about the gun confiscations that government did in New Orleans after Katrina? The Patriot Act? Did you have a chance to vote to keep that from happening? Can you vote to stop wasting $30 billion every year on a failed “war on drugs”? No, the government continues to operate as it has for at least 90 years, unilaterally, in its own interest. And every two years it allows us to go through a charade it calls an “election” to keep the masses thinking they are in control.

• Election accuracy is highly suspect. They are increasingly fraught with miscounting, mistakes, ineptitude, and downright fraud:
  In 2004, a worker at a Toledo, Ohio, election office found 300 completed absentee ballots in a storage room more than a month after the vote. At least half hadn't been counted, and they affected the result of at least one local contest... In 1998, former congressman Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, was convicted of absentee-ballot fraud in a nursing home, where residents' failing mental capacities make them an easy mark. Three companies -- Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia -- control 80 percent of the nation's voting and tabulating machines. These companies that we entrust with our franchise operate without public oversight. The software in machines of all three companies are proprietary, and when voters faced with surprising election results have sued to examine the machines, elections officials have claimed they are prohibited by contract from allowing inspection.

   Yet with all these reasons to not vote, taking the final plunge into principled abstention is not easy. When I broached the subject with my wife she gave me a response that is not uncommon: “But, you must vote, if for no other reason than to make a statement.” But what kind of statement is it to continuously engage in an exercise in futility that is useless at best and may even be fraudulent? Isn't it a much louder and more thought provoking statement to answer the inevitable question that comes on election day from friends and co-workers, “Did you vote yet?” by saying that you no longer believe in voting? Isn't that a good conversation starter?

   William Conger has created what he calls the Anti-Electorate Manifesto. It goes something like this:


We, the Anti-Electorate, do not believe there is a need for "strong leadership" in government.
We are not drawn to "intellectual" authorities and political "heroes."
We are not impressed with titles, ranks, and pecking orders – politicians, celebrities, and gurus.
We do not struggle for control of organizations, social circles, and government.
We do not lobby the State for favors or permission to control those with whom we disagree.
Rather, we advocate freedom.
By its very nature, the State does not.
Exercise your right to say "No" to the warfare-welfare system.
Refuse to vote. Then tell your friends why.

   Opting out of the political system entirely is a very liberating feeling. After all, if politics is so good, why do so many people suffer because of it? Butler Schaffer points out that politics managed to kill off some 200,000,000 of our fellow humans in the 20th century alone. With our Constitution and bill of rights securely in place and a free and unfettered market to drive the economy we'd all be just fine. From that point on voting for stuff can only make things worse.

So whats my non-political answer to the futility of politics? How about voting in the only way that really matters- with your dollars. If we foster a society where all interactions are voluntary and based on the bedrock libertarian tenets of no force and no fraud, the market will provide everything we are voting for today. Except corrupt politicians and “leaders” who dictate what we are allowed to do and say and think.  And the only way we can bring about such a society is through individual action, activism, evangelism, and the “in-activism” of not endorsing a coercive political process by not participating in it. Just like you can't eat yourself thin or spend yourself wealthy, you sure as hell can't vote yourself free.