I have never voted in my adult life. I don’t refrain from voting because I’m an irresponsible citizen or because I’m lazy or apathetic. I pay my taxes. I work my tail off to support my family. I care very deeply about what’s going on in my home country and in the world.
I just don’t believe that voting is the way to make the world a better place. I’m in protest of the whole system. I know I’m not alone in thinking that the system is broken and that we as voters don’t really have any representative power at all despite society bombarding us with messages that the opposite is true.
We aren’t stupid or crazy. We aren’t lazy or apathetic or irresponsible. We’re the ones who are aware of the problem. We’re the ones who have stopped lying to ourselves about the fact that the system doesn’t work.
I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I was eligible to vote after I turned eighteen. The year was 1992 and Bill Clinton was running for president of the US against George Bush.
The country viewed Bill Clinton the same way it viewed Barack Obama in 2008. People thought of Clinton as the new, young blood full of fresh, modern ideas. Everyone thought he would breathe life back into the country after twelve years of the Reagan-Bush era.
I was in college at the time and at work on election day. I was busy doing a job I loved. We had a deadline we had to meet. A moment came where I would have had to leave work and travel across campus to the polls if I wanted to vote in time.
I thought it over and my gut said, No. I went back to work and I didn’t vote. I have never voted since.
Let’s take a look at the way the system really works.
First of all, if the person or party you voted for doesn’t get into office, you get nothing. You don’t get represented even a little bit. You get zero. So if you don’t belong to the majority, you’re screwed. Representation doesn’t exist for you at all.
If the person or party you voted for does get into office, they can turn around and do exactly the opposite of whatever they said they were going to do beforehand. They can do exactly the opposite of whatever they said to get themselves elected in the first place.
Then you and everyone who voted for them gets nothing. You don’t get represented even a little bit. You get zero—which means that the whole country gets zero representation.
We’ve seen this time and time again with dozens of elected officials at every level of government. They say one thing and make a bunch of promises on the campaign trail. They espouse a bunch of moral values and take a bunch of stands that everyone agrees with.
Then the person or party gets into office and immediately does exactly the opposite. In some cases, they do exactly the same thing their opponent said they were going to do—exactly the thing the population voted against.
So if this is the case, the whole population gets no representation and the election process is completely moot. We might as well not have held an election at all.
This has been going on for decades. I honestly don’t see how anyone can believe in the democratic process at all anymore.
Now consider the amount of actual representation I would get if the democratic process worked perfectly. Imagine that the person or party I voted for does get into office and imagine by some chance they did what they said they were going to do.
In that case, the amount of my personal representation would be only one microscopic fraction of the whole group that voted the person or party into office. This number could be in the millions or even billions depending on the size of the country I’m in. I would get one millionth or maybe even less representation than that.
It isn’t as though the candidate or party has to listen to me once they get into office. It isn’t as though I have a direct phone line to my representative that I can weigh in on whatever issues the person or party is facing. I don’t really get a say in what they do, what policies they make, or how they handle any given issue.
It isn't as though any one individual Trump voter can phone up the president and tell him not to attack Venezuela or Iran or to stop sending weapons to Ukraine. I doubt even his biggest campaign donors have the power to tell him that.
My representation ends when the person or party takes office. Then they can do whatever they want. They don’t answer to the people anymore at all.
Now consider the time, attention, and mental energy I would have to invest in the process just to be able to vote. I would have to research the candidates to find out their backgrounds, histories, and positions. I would have to follow the news, which causes significant mental stress and requires a major investment of time and attention.
Add this up over the local, state, and national election processes. We could be talking about hundreds of candidates I would have to research, follow, listen to, read about, and evaluate. Who has the time or attention for that?
This investment and the cost of my time and energy isn’t worth the almost non-existent speck of representation I might theoretically get if I happen to vote for the person or party that gets into office.
I’m not typically in the majority. I’m an unconventional person with unconventional views. I don't belong to any party. I'm independent. I loathe all politicians equally. They’re the scum of the Earth in my opinion. They have to be power-seeking and narcissistic even to seek office in the first place. I don’t usually agree with any of the candidates or parties that run for office. I don’t see any of them earning my vote with their upright behavior and integrity. Quite the opposite.
The likelihood that the candidate or party will violate their campaign promises far outweighs the likelihood that they will actually represent the people who voted for them. I see no reason to make such a significant investment for no likely return.
I don’t see that voting has any impact on the outcome at all or the state of the country. I see the same uni-party system getting into power election after election. I see one candidate doing the same thing every other candidate is doing and one party doing exactly the same thing every other party is doing. I see all of them violating the system and using the population for their own power-hungry ends.
The system itself is working overtime to convince me that this is the way things operate. Every candidate and party that comes along convinces me through their actions that this is the way things operate. Someone would have to go a long way to convince me otherwise.
I see much more value in removing myself from the system and focusing my time and mental energies elsewhere. I can see many other areas of life where I can have a much greater impact on how the country and population grows and develops into the future.
I’ll be putting my time and effort into those until I see some significant social and cultural change that convinces me to do things differently.
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