Don’t Vote — It Only Encourages Them:

There was an anarchist slogan in the 1960s: If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.

Some 20 years ago, my union local held an election. I read the many campaign mailings. When I

received the ballot, I voted only for those candidates who had sent no literature and of whom I

knew nothing. Unlike the others, they hadn’t proven themselves idiots…

I find two honorable arguments for not voting: the philosophical and the immediate. The first is

nearly as old as the Republic and premised on the common law. As advanced by Josiah

Warren, Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre and Benjamin Tucker, no person can ethically

occupy a position of power over another without that person’s consent. … In 1890, De Cleyre explained her moral opposition to political office and the process of voting

thus: “A body of voters cannot give into your charge any rights but their own. By no possible

jugglery of logic can they delegate the exercise of any function which they themselves do not

control. If any individual on earth has a right to delegate his powers to whomsoever he chooses,

then every other individual has an equal right; and if each has an equal right, then none can

choose an agent for another without the other’s consent. Therefore, if the power of government

resides in the whole people and out of that whole all but one elected you as their agent, you

would still have no authority whatever to act for that one.”

…If one does not reject the state, however, the immediate argument for not voting remains: the

men on the ballot. “If the Gods had meant us to vote,” Jim Hightower has written, “they would

have given us candidates.” New York Press