Please stop voting

You’re just making things worse

You may have heard that Facebook has been under pressure to limit the spread of deceptive political campaign ads. So far, Facebook has refused the invitation to filter political messages, with one big exception: ads that discourage voting.

All manner of “fake news” is fine on Facebook, but the good news that you shouldn’t bother to vote is apparently beyond the pale.

So it’s up to those of us who don’t have much of an advertising budget, but who do have some generosity and public spirit, to turn to Medium instead. And so:

Please Don’t Vote

Please don’t vote or encourage others to vote in this noxious presidential election. Instead, feel free to ignore the candidates and their positions, so that even if you were forced at gunpoint into a voting booth this November you wouldn’t have any idea which box to ☑. In this way you can be of greater service to your country, your community, your loved ones, and yourself.

There are three main reasons why I hope you will follow this heretical (banned!) advice. One is simple and easily-demonstrated: your vote would not change the outcome of the election, and whether you carefully cast your vote or just flip a coin in the voting booth or make other plans entirely, the effect you have on who becomes president will be the same.

The second reason requires more imagination but amounts to this: presidential elections like this one are harmful, and they become more so the more attention people devote to them. Most anything else you can imagine doing with your time other than paying attention to politicians this year would be more beneficial to you, to your loved ones, and to your community.

Then there’s the dessert — almost the best reason of all: if you resolve not to vote in November, you can stop paying attention. You can let all of the squabbling go on without you, and you can ignore the impassioned partisans and indignant commercials and breathless pundits and your earnest and tireless relative who forwards everything. You’ll thank me.

Let me explain those first two reasons in a little more detail, though, in case you were not immediately convinced.

Voting for President is Pointless

Your vote, should you fail to heed my advice and decide to cast one, will make no difference to who is sworn in as president next year. If you cast your vote for the candidate whose stated positions most closely match your views, whose image is most sympathetic to your self-image, who seems wisest and most well-advised — or if you devilishly succumb to a whim to do exactly the opposite — it doesn’t matter, because your vote will not make any difference.

This is not because American elections are corrupt and error-prone, though certainly they are. True enough: because of hours-long lines at select polling places, poor interface design, the ease of malicious hacking, shady voter-roll manipulation, and other such reasons, there is only a dim resemblance between the vote tally and the actual preferences of the citizenry. Also true: your well-considered, carefully-researched, intelligently-selected vote will be swamped by the haphazard votes of dozens of morons or by flipped bits in the slapdash voting machine or by snafus at the post office. It also cannot be denied that if the vote totals are by some chance close enough to matter in some important precinct, the results will quickly be taken out of the hands of the voters entirely and left to the chad-wrangling of political operatives and partisan judges.

Compelling as they are, these are not even the best reasons why voting is pointless. Even if none of these things were true, the sheer size of the electorate makes any individual vote worthless. Even if every eligible voter were able to vote, and every vote were counted, only once, and actually represented the real, informed intention of a real, live voter, and even if the weird electoral college were replaced with something sensible so that everyone’s vote counted for just as much as anyone else’s — even then, you would be wasting your time to vote.

As the size of the electorate increases, the likelihood that any one vote will change the outcome quickly, asymptotically approaches zero. At its current size, and at the width of the finest pen with which we can draw this asymptote, it is indistinguishable from zero.

But, you may be thinking, although my vote individually may not make a difference, our votes (you and me, and our right-thinking friends) might — if there are enough of us. Isn’t it true that if voting is irrational, and if rational people were to act on this knowledge by abstaining from voting, that our elections would necessarily be decided by the opinions of people who are too irrational, mathematically illiterate, and/or unwise to refrain from voting? Can we risk that?

The answer to this objection is that, yes, tautologically, to the extent that our presidential elections are decided by the expressed aggregate will of the voters, they are decided by those too unwise to refrain from voting. No, we shouldn’t risk such a crazy thing, but you cannot change it by voting, because by voting you immediately become part of the problem you hope to solve.

(photo by ZioDave)

It’s like looking at a sidewalk Three-card Monte game and saying to yourself that you’d better throw down a bet, because otherwise that unscrupulous dealer will be able to con all those suckers who don’t know the trick. If you play, you’re the sucker.

But aha! Here’s a tough question: “If my vote is so darned worthless, why are so many people spending so much time and energy and money trying to obtain it?” This is indeed a nut that needs cracking, but it will have to wait until the next section.

If participating in the electoral spectacle were merely pointless, I wouldn’t be writing this screed. Many of our innocent pastimes don’t accomplish much, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However…

Voting is Harmful

If you put the dread judgment of mathematics aside, elections might be worth getting excited about if they were actually what they sometimes pretend to be: how we choose qualified people to take necessary and important social policy-making and -enacting jobs, in such a way that those people best represent the considered judgments of the citizenry.

But elections like the one being inflicted on us now are nothing of the sort.

Elections Empower Psychopaths

For one thing, elections like these effectively select some of the worst people among us by perversely rewarding the sort of charming mendacity and amoral ruthlessness that characterize psychopaths.

If you watch a political debate or stump speech or what-have-you, you’re watching someone whose every word is chosen to manipulate you. Honesty — that is, the genuine motivation to inform someone accurately about what they want or need to know — never enters into it for a second. I’ve met people like this, and you probably have too — people who seem to think that the only purpose of speech is to tell self-serving stories designed to trick other people into doing what they want. When we meet such people in real life we warn our friends about them and speculate as to how they became the monsters they are. But when they get on stage and try to get us to vote for them, many of us lose all of our good sense.

“Well, that’s the way the game is played,” I sometimes hear. “If you don’t fight dirty you can’t win, so even the good ones have to fight dirty. An honest candidate couldn’t win.” But please consider: if you have accidentally (let us hope) established a political system that excels at elevating psychopaths to positions of power and authority, maybe the answer is not to hope for a flock of honorable people who can impersonate psychopaths long enough to climb into power, but to stop supporting a process that installs psychopaths as your rulers, and, once these psychopaths have been successfully identified by their success in the electoral process, to stop giving them so much power to do evil.

Our Elections Aren’t Democratic but a Substitute for Democracy

Sometimes people respond to criticisms like this by saying that I’m asking too much: We can’t wait around for an ideal utopian democracy. Imperfect elections designed by mortal men are better than none at all. Would I rather have a hereditary monarchy or a dictatorship?

(detail from a photo by jensowagner)

But these elections aren’t just imperfect incarnations of democracy— they’re not democratic at all if by “democratic” you mean people ruling themselves rather than being subjected to the rule of others. And isn’t that the important metric? I mean, heck, they even vote in North Korea.

It’s as if your dad promised to take you to a baseball game and instead took you to a junkyard where nine mannequins were stood up against a fence wearing baseball caps. “Well, it’s not an ideal baseball game, I’ll grant you that, but we can’t expect perfection. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Besides, you told me you hate football. Want a bag of styrofoam popcorn?”

Electioneering Makes Government More Dangerous

Those who exaggerate the importance of voting (to explain how important it is for you to vote, and in a particular way) also tend to exaggerate the power of office-holders and the abilities (and propensities) of the politicians who hold office. This has the unfortunate side effect of getting people accustomed to the idea that these offices ought to have great powers concentrated in them, and ought to be looked on to solve our problems, create miracles, provide for our needs, and so forth. This in turn makes the psychopaths in power more dangerous.

Elections Degrade Our Characters

These election campaigns degrade the honesty, decency, and community solidarity of people who are persuaded to participate in them. They turn otherwise good people into spin doctors who see half of their fellow-citizens as enemies to be defeated and who annoy the rest of us with their email forwards and arguments. They harm our communities, waste our resources, distract us from important work we could be doing, and embarrass us in the eyes of posterity. The best way we can confront them is to refuse to fan the flames or provide fresh fuel.

Why They Spend So Much 💰 for Your Worthless Vote

Earlier I raised the question of why so much money and effort is being spent to chase down votes that I claimed weren’t worth anything at all. The answer is that your vote is of no value to you, but it may under some circumstances have some tiny value to those who want to harvest it. Let me explain:

Your presidential vote (assuming your state is even “in play”) may be a tiny bit important and a tiny bit valuable to vote harvesters — though only as a fraction of the aggregate votes in your state. This much makes intuitive sense. But to you, your vote is not even worth that fraction. This can be more difficult to understand.

It’s kind of like how Coke & Pepsi spend an enormous amount of money, time, and creative talent to try to influence people to choose one their almost identical products. Imagine how eagerly they would be trying if, by convincing a majority of Americans to choose one or the other, they could force 100% of us to drink nothing but for the next four years. In such a case, your vote — even your wee little vote — might indeed be worth something for Coke & Pepsi to pursue… but how much would it be worth it to you to cast that vote? Nothing at all, even if you preferred Coke or Pepsi very much.

Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing to Add Life.

As with the campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, the campaigns for president have little to do with the actual merits, if you can call them that, of the products. People cast their votes not for the person and policies that eventually may occupy the office of president, but in a popularity contest between market-tested brands. How foolish do you have to be to think that their behavior in office will resemble their ad copy? Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change or Trump for failing to Drain The Swamp is like blaming Coke for failing to Add Life.

If you pay attention to this charade, you give it more media market share — more “eyeballs.” You make the aggregate a little bigger and the election that much more expensive (if you’re buying it) or profitable (if you’re selling the tools to win it) — slightly increasing the amount of resources required to chase down votes, and thereby also increasing the various harms, including of course the endless corrupting pursuit of campaign cash by the politicians.

Voting Is No Substitute for Doing the Right Thing

In order to convince yourself to vote, or more specifically to vote “correctly,” you must tell yourself a story in which your vote is actually important or influential. This reinforces the illusion that the subjects of the U.S. government have meaningful democratic influence over its policies, and therefore reduces the chances that you will look honestly at the real state of politics or will work for genuine change.

When you exaggerate the importance of voting for president — by urging people to vote one way or another or by making a big deal about anything the candidates are doing — you reinforce the illusion that voting for the right person is something like doing the right thing, maybe even more important. But nothing could be further from the truth: the problems with our country won’t be solved by what people vote for on their ballots one day in November every four years, but by what they do on the 1,460 days in-between.

What You Can Do Instead

Well, then, what do I suggest? It is important, isn’t it, who the president is? We have to do something to make our influence felt, and, unless you’ve got the sniper chops of a Lee Harvey Oswald, election season is the time to do it, right? After all, even if the saying is true that “if voting could change anything, it would be illegal,” isn’t that also true of not voting?

Don’t slip back into superstition! Just because there isn’t an actual legal way for citizens to exercise democratic control over the government, that doesn’t make the fake ways any less fake. Just because you can’t win the lottery by crossing your fingers doesn’t mean you should knock-on-wood twice as hard.

I’ve got a better idea: Every time you feel tempted to click on that headline about the latest debates, every time you’re tempted to unmute the campaign commercial or click “play” on that dreadful gaffe, every time you find yourself on the verge of forwarding something about the candidates to your friends… get up, walk calmly to the bathroom sink, and floss your teeth.

Most people don’t floss their teeth nearly often enough (my dentist tells me I’m one of them). But flossing can prevent painful tooth decay, embarrassing and off-putting bad breath, infectious disease, and apparently even (through mechanisms still under investigation) heart disease. By flossing, you practice inexpensive preventative medicine that will contribute to your better flourishing while at the same time it reduces the likelihood that you will need expensive medical care.

Make a disaster preparation kit. Check your smoke detector batteries. Read a good book. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Any of those things would be better for you and your community than participating in the Election 2020 foofaraw.

I bet you’ve got some even better ideas. I chose some trivial examples here just as a way of reemphasizing how ultratrivial voting is, but if you are as concerned about the direction of our country as many of my voting friends say they are, there are so many genuinely important and useful things you could be doing. Do some.

But please don’t vote. Encourage your friends and loved ones not to vote as well. Don’t feel like you have to participate in discussing the foibles of the candidates or comparing their “positions,” and don’t be afraid to be utterly ignorant of the horse race. Be proud of it! As it is, I couldn’t pick Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Yang out of a photo lineup, but I’d be even happier if I’d never seen their names.

Be like the wise owl. When someone corners you and says “did you hear that [politician] said [awful thing],” just say: “Who?”

If you resolve now that you’re not going to vote and that you’re not going to encourage other people’s political baloney either, you free yourself from any obligation to follow the campaign trivia. You’ll be happier, more productive and helpful, and less of an annoyance to your friends and family. Smile. Let out a sigh of relief. Get your “Delete”-clicking finger ready, and start daydreaming about what you’re going to do with all of your extra time, mental energy, and social capital.