Why I Don't Vote

Least people go, "What the fuck?" at the title of this post, allow me to explain some things. I first voted at the tender age of 18 and participated in every vote until 2008. Since then I stopped voting and even went one step further by deregistering myself from the voter roles. So it's not like I haven't participated in the right to vote in the past. But around that time, I had been focusing on politics for years and came to the painfully obvious realization that my vote doesn't matter to anyone at all. And I'm not entirely alone in my not voting.

I'm an independent. That is to say, I have moderate points of view when all my points of view are averaged out. Some are blatantly rightist. Some are definitely leftist. (See my "Where I Stand" post for an overview of them.) But there are no moderate candidates. There are rightist candidates and leftist candidates but no moderate candidates. My choices are the devel on the right and the deep blue sea on the left.

I don't particularly want to vote for either of them.

Until 1998, I realized that I wasn't really that politically "aware". Politics wasn't my thing. Since then I've educated myself on the process and with that education came the realization that democracy is a fucked up concept. Not in and of itself, but how it's practiced in the Untied States of America. We're NOT a democracy. We're a democratic republic of independent states play-acting at cooperation. We don't even elect our national leaders by majority vote. And we're the only country on earth that makes six to ten states ALONE the deciders of the Presidential elections every four years.

But to top it off, we let ANYONE vote - or at least anyone White. Any citizen of color who can produce papers in triplicate that have been lost, found, buried in peat for three years, recovered, cleaned off, scrutinized by a panel of three rightists then ignored until after the current election can vote, too. But race aside, we have no other criteria for allowing people unfettered access to depositing their little turds in the ballot box. They can vote for any reason they want: the color of a persons' skin, their stand on a single issue, the way you feel when you look into their eyes or even on their overall positions and policies. Sadly, that last is usually the LAST reason people vote for a candidate because it's not about positions or policies. It's about who zinged the other guy the most. Whoever spends the most money spreading lies, rumors, innuendo and just plain mud almost ALWAYS wins.

Why do you think this campaign year quadrupled in cost for the presidential race over the 2000 presidential race? That's right, folks, the race to the top went to almost two billion dollars, up from the 500 million spent on the Bush/Gore fight of 2000. This includes vast sums of money from anonymous super PACS who don't have to disclose (or go to great lengths to conceal) who they really are. If you don't believe the stuff in my book, all you need to do is look to see who's financing the run to the top (either directly by direct donations and/or anonymously through super PACS) to know that our country's rulers aren't picked by the people, but by the elite. And the elite make sure their choices do their bidding. Both sides do this, but the majority of donations to the left come from average people while there are a few gigantic spenders on the right-wing side who invest vast sums of their wealth on their hand-picked choices of candidate to ensure they get wealthier.

This is how it's always been, but at least publics' perception of the involvement of the wealthy in politics before had the courtesy to stay in smoke-filled rooms rather than blaring in people's faces when the same SuperPAC TV ad runs at every commercial break time between 5 and 8 PM.

If you toss in the ongoing Electronic Voting Machine issues today, where one hacker can CHANGE millions of votes and the ongoing right-wing assault on keeping minorities from voting (because they usually vote left wing), you realize that there is almost no chance that your vote will actually help anyone.

Finally, WHERE you live makes all the difference whether or not you have the motivation to vote. There are about 10 states (or one fifth of the country) who will determine who gets to be President. All the other states either always swing left or, more often, swing right. And when one starts parsing it down even further, one can look at the most populous counties in those states and focus on those individuals to get their vote. So in THOSE states, your vote is likely to count - assuming anyone lets you vote, actually counts your vote and doesn't CHANGE your vote anywhere along the way.

Do you begin to grasp the futility of it all? It's not as if your, or my, lowly little vote is going to count for ANYTHING because there's a good chance that you live in a state where it won't matter (there are too many people voting against you - or with you - to make one vote matter), or you live in a state with a high degree of voter manipulation in the FIRST place and where your balloting process can't be trusted. For a country like the United States, this state of affairs is reprehensible. But while a lot of people are bitching about it, no one is doing shit to change it. Why not?

The elite don't want it changed. God forbid people actually THINKING about their vote.

And let's not mention the tedium, time and difficulty in actually getting your vote in. Granted, there are ways to mitigate that, but for those who don't or can't do them, standing in line to vote on a fucking WEEKDAY between 8 AM and 8 PM is all that's left. Maybe you didn't get fired for voting on office hours because you couldn't otherwise make it to the polls before they closed back in 1790, but you sure as hell can today.

So for a lack of selection among candidates who are guaranteed to represent NO MORE THAN HALF of MY views (and always considerably less than that), not living in a swing (AKA "Battleground") state, being consistently lied to by all the candidates and all of the proponents and all of the opponents of ballot measures while the wealthy piss money on top of our upstretched, mouth-breathing faces where there are three fucking retards voting based on one single issue for every genius voting for their well considered and reasoned choice, why the FUCK would ANYONE want to vote?

So I don't. At least I can honestly say, "I didn't vote for that guy" when it all goes down the shitter. And we all know it will sooner or later.