A Democratic Refusal To Vote

Several months ago I took an online quiz about which candidate I most truly agreed with on the important issues. Before this, I was also sure and determined to finally use my first chance to participate in an election to vote for Barack Obama. Yet, as silly as it sounds, this quiz has changed my whole perspective of democratic representation in the United States. It said that I sided only 67% with Barack Obama and to put it in perspective, he surely has my vote over Mitt Romney—who I only found common ground with on 13% of the issues. My concerns arose when it said that my views were 90% in line with Jill Stein.

This got me thinking: why shouldn't I be voting for the candidate I agree with most? It took a while, but then I decided I would vote third-party—I wanted to use my vote to most fully express my democratic views. If I voted for Barack Obama this election, I would only be speaking to our democracy at 2/3 volume. I wanted my voice to be heard.

This lasted for a couple weeks until I was overcome by a feeling of dread. Am I really participating in our democracy and the future of my country? Sure, I’m casting my vote with the candidate I most strongly agree with…but there is no chance Ms. Stein will ever win. Last year the sum of the whole third-party option received one-percent of the nation’s vote. Am I really using my voice, if I’m just yelling into an empty room? So I decided that I would not vote as a protest to a democracy that robs me of my political expression through voting.

Yet, I thought, am I just being a sore loser? My third-party of choice isn’t popular and stands no chance of winning because they simply are not attractive enough to the American majority. That certainly would be the case, if I didn’t believe that our two-party monopoly both systematically and actively works to oppress the third-party vote.

Systematic disenfranchisement; the inescapable visibility and presence of the two parties deter the attention given to the third-party options. Third-party candidates are not invited to debates, they are but rarely interviewed by the mainstream media and they receive no front page coverage. When Ron Paul ran for President in 1988 he garnered less than 1% of the vote as the Libertarian Party candidate. If you can’t beat them, join them, right? This year he ran as a candidate for the Republican Party, and received over 20% of the vote in the Ohio Primary. This is but just one prime example of the system that empowers the two-party stranglehold over the information given to voters about other candidates’ views. A system that produces substantially different voting results for the same candidate with the same views, only because he is running for a mainstream party is a system that disenfranchises the third-party potential.

Active disenfranchisement; the dominant political class works to obstruct the potential of the third-party candidates to ensure their entrenched power. The only thing a Republican candidate hates more than a Democratic candidate is the idea of having to expend the resources to combat a second legitimate opponent. If there is one thing that the two parties can surely agree upon, it is to make sure that the voting base stays allied only with them; to make sure that the far-left wingers feel hopeless in voting for the Green party (or any other more aligned leftist third-party) and that the far-right wingers feel hopeless in voting for the Libertarian party (or any other more aligned conservative third-party). See: the widespread blame of Ralph Nader for Gore’s loss in 2000. Just imagine the horror—American people voting for somebody more in line with their views.

There are two important elements to this argument. We have established thus far that we have a democratic system in which subscribing to one of the two parties is our only legitimate choice. This seems to be a commonly accepted notion in American politics—you either vote Republican or Democrat. The question then becomes: Is this enough? Can a two-party system ever really represent our political views? Absolutely not.

We must surely understand that any one political view cannot exist on a two-choice scale. Gun control, for example, includes a wide spectrum of opinions on how to deal with gun possession and sales in America. In another instance, views on abortion exist in at least three major forms: Pro-choice, pro-life with an exception for rape and incest, and pro-life in all circumstances. I won’t try to pretend like I could articulate the dozens of approaches to stabilizing our economy, but there is inarguably a wide spectrum of them.

In essence, any single issue that may be considered in a parties’ political platform does not exist in black and white terms, but has a number of approaches. When we multiply this by the dozens of important issues that a platform considers, there is just no way two parties can appropriately embody America’s diverse political views. Our opinions on complex matters like gun control, abortion, or fiscal policy cannot be expressed on a binary scale, so why should our democracy?

To give more insight, let me propose a similar scenario: the uneducated voter. Why exactly is it that we become so frustrated when a voter participates but is not engaged? Say he goes to the voting booth knowing just a bit about the candidate. And then he goes into polling place and casts his vote, and when we—the general public, naturally concerned with pure participation in the election—chastise and become frustrated with such a man. But why? The system we have now requires us to know little more about the candidates than whether we are slightly on the left or right. The complexities of political opinion have been boiled down to a two-prong choice and this uneducated voter has not been required to strive to learn about the candidates or make any attempt at political introspection. This man does exactly what the system wants: vote on your basic instinct; on your friends and your family; on the most rudimentary of self-expressions. If you think that this type of person is a sham and lazy, you’re misdirecting your anger—it’s the system that’s a sham. He may have lazy political opinions, but that’s all a two-choice system requires of its voters to be represented. When he’s voted he has expressed his views as totally as you or I.

But it doesn’t stop there; it can become worse than non-representation and turn actually into misrepresentation. What happens when I would like to vote on the side of conservative social issues, but I find myself agreeing with liberal economic policy? Who do I vote for then? If the social issues are but a bit more important, I find myself voting Republican but nearly half of my vote is not just thrown away (as in the case of non-representation), but it is actually robbed and skewered. Now I am forced to spend the next four years supporting a President who has misrepresented my feelings on economic matters in every single way. Surely we are to agree that such a system is the literal opposite of democratic representation.

Has a democracy been created because now we have just one other choice? The mere addition of a second choice is not a satisfactory solution to the problem of an executive monarchy. The realities of political stances are more complex than black and white issues and a system that forces us to express them as such is little more than an illusory democracy.

The argument has been laid out as such: The power-wielding Republicans and Democrats systematically and actively disenfranchise the third-party potential, thus we only have two legitimate voting options. Opinions do not exist on a binary scale; rather a deeply complex spectrum of gray, and as such a two-party democracy under-expresses and sometimes even misrepresents the interests of our voters.

And in that case, I refuse to legitimize a system that disenfranchises the political expressions of myself and millions of others. If I vote, I am participating in a system that actively works against my own democratic interests. For me to participate would be for me to suggest that our current democratic method is appropriately representing my views, but if you have agreed with the argument above, you would agree this certainly is not the case. So why would I do anything but refuse to participate? And come Election Day, I’ll be as engaged as anybody in shaping the future of our country. Just like everybody else, I’ll be using my ballot to express the change I want to see in our country—the end of the oppressive two-party monopoly.