Why I Don’t Vote
Abstinence is having what I believe is called a moment. Everywhere a vast literature of self-denial proclaims the benefits of not drinking, not eating carbohydrates, not having sex, not watering one’s lawn. Practically the only thing from which the American people are not serially asked to refrain happens to be the one vice that I have managed to renounce, in my case with very little difficulty. I mean, of course, voting.
“Why does anyone vote?” I ask myself. The answer cannot be that we believe that by doing so, we will influence the outcome of an election. My vote, were it not withheld, would have no such effect. This is true even at the county or municipal level. The vote margins for the State of Florida in the presidential election of 2000 — the closest in modern American history — were in the hundreds, not the single digits. Voting is, strictly speaking, pointless.
Those of us who wear the temperance ribbon are accustomed to hearing the same wearyingly familiar rejoinder: If everyone felt this way, no one would vote, and then what? To which the answer, of course, is that I am not responsible for the votes of everyone. We do not live in England before the Reform Bill of 1832, when, for example, two periwigged gentlemen of Dunwich each controlled the votes of eight of the 32 total freedmen. (In the bad old days, one vote really could make a difference.) Under universal suffrage, the likelihood that everyone will follow me into recusancy is nil.
Most voters, I suspect, agree with this analysis, even if they would not put it precisely this way. Their actual reasons for voting have less to do with the practical effect of pulling the lever and more to do with the significance they ascribe to voting itself.
When I was growing up I was solemnly informed that voting was one’s civic duty. I fear that this quaint phrase does not quite catch in my throat. Civic duty is a protean concept. In the antebellum South, members of night patrols considered it their civic duty to hunt down fugitive slaves. In the course of our country’s history, the concept has also been invoked to describe obligations as various as membership in eugenics societies and the promise of Catholics to take up arms against the Holy See in the event of a papal invasion. To me, civic duty simply means paying taxes and obeying all reasonable laws (e.g., registering for the Selective Service). Your proverbial mileage may vary.
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, civic duty is surely the first. Some version of the civic-duty line is trotted out by the sort of do-gooder who hands out voter registration forms to strangers — an activity I find as off-putting as I would an invitation to sit down and fill out a handgun permit.
