I Voted

I’m voting in an election for the first time in 24 years.

To those familiar with my views on voting, this will come as a surprise. My take, which I’ve written about and publicly debated many times over the years, is this:

1. The likelihood that your single vote will change the outcome of an election—especially a presidential election—is so vanishingly small as to be zero. What this means is that if you’d abstained from every election you’ve ever voted in, none of the results would be any different.

2. The aggregate of many people abstaining will influence election outcomes, but there are quite a lot of actions where, if many people abstained, bad results would occur, but we nonetheless don’t believe any single person has an obligation to participate.

3. This makes the claim that any one of us is obligated to vote rather weak. And any obligation we might have is quite minimal, and so easily defeated by other considerations, including principled objection and religious faith.

4. That minimal obligation can become stronger the more likely it is that your own abstaining or participating will influence the outcome. Thus the fewer people expected to participate, or the narrower the margin of victory, the greater your obligation to vote.

5. But people act as if (4) is false. They get mad at non-voters in presidential elections, when the most people will vote and so the margins will be the largest in total quantity of votes, and don’t get mad at people who abstain from very small local elections when their vote has the greatest likelihood of determining the results.

6. This means that, in effectively every instance, an individual decision to abstain from voting is morally permissible. Put another way, if you abstain, you haven’t done anything blameworthy or wrong.

7. However, contra some who more strongly oppose voting, the act of participating is not wrong, either. You’re undertaking an action that, in effectively every instance, will have no effect on the world whatsoever, and so is best seen as morally neutral.

8. Therefore, you should vote if you want to. You should abstain if you feel you have a justified reason for doing so. In either case, you should view your vote as an expressive act, not an influential one.

I have personally abstained for 24 years because I object to political power. I think that it is wrong, except in a very few circumstances, to use violence or the threat of violence to force other people to do what you haven’t been able to persuade them to do. And political power is, inevitably, coercion through the mechanism of violence or the threat of violence. Thus I didn’t want to give my expressive stamp of approval to a system that exists primarily to exercise unjust force.

This election is different, however. It’s become increasingly clear—and entirely unavoidable over the last several months—that actual fascism is on the ballot. It was possible, if unpersuasive, a year or two or four ago to argue that wasn’t the case. That we didn’t have a regime lined up that would bring fascism to America if it won control. But today the evidence is overwhelming.

I’m voting this time not because I’ve changed my mind about points (1) through (8) above. Rather, I’m voting because it is an expressive act. When fascism is on the ballot, the right thing to do is, at the very least, expressively condemn it.