Why I Didn’t Vote

This past November, my grandmother kindly went to the trouble of obtaining an

absentee ballot for me to vote in the Pennsylvania midterm elections, but I never filled
that ballot out, and it now lies in a trash heap somewhere. I wasn’t trying to spite my
grandmother. I made a deliberate, reasoned choice not to vote—yes, you can do such a
thing. I am not referring to a decision to abstain because neither major party strikes your
fancy, or because you reject the country’s entire political-economic system. My decision
was not guided by any such political angst, although such a motive for abstention may be
perfectly legitimate. No, my decision was motivated, quite simply, by my own ignorance.
But let me explain further.
As I approached the first election for which I would be of legal voting age, I was a
little puzzled as to why all my elder relations were so supremely concerned with whether
I planned to vote. Strangely, they did not seem at all concerned whether I would cast an
informed, judicious vote. None of them made any efforts to ensure that my political
education was sufficient, aside from tossing a few pro-life pamphlets at me. Of course,
this aroused my suspicion that my elders were only desirous to add one more tally to the
party of their own political persuasion.
My puzzlement at this odd approach to civic duty did not abate. It stuck with me
until I was recently reminded of it by, of all things, a Doritos bag. On the back of this bag
was a marketing shtick claiming, “Doritos Supports Kids Who Do Something!” (or along
those lines). The bag profiled a young man who had founded an organization to increase
the number of young people voting. Now, I must make it clear that I am fully in support
of the intentions of this noble endeavor. But this crinkly bag of snack food called my
attention back to something fishy about the prevailing attitude toward elections. This was
the same fishiness I had smelt around my relatives, and it consisted in this: the Doritos
bag praised this young man’s organization simply for increasing the youth vote by
250,000, or some number, without any mention of the quality of those votes.
It might seems strange to talk about the quality of a vote, but I believe it only
seems strange because we are not used to talking about it, and that is because all people’s
opinions must be regarded as equal, etc., etc. But when I say quality of a vote, I mean
simply the common notion, taught in all civics classes, that a citizen must investigate the
candidates thoroughly and make a sensible and impartial decision, to the best of his or her
abilities. Shouldn’t we be more concerned with the lack of voter quality than of voter
quantity? How does an increase in votes by 250,000 benefit the nation, if each of those
votes might have been chosen based on the names of the candidates or completely at
random, for all we know? Yet one seldom hears a big to-do made over any attempts by
individuals or organizations to enable the citizenry to carry out their civic duty with
prudence and justice. I am sure that such attempts exist—maybe the organization featured
on the Doritos bag even has an educational and informational branch—but this crucial
side of the duty of voting is too often ignored.
That Doritos bag represented to me what seems to be the common opinion of
voting in America (I am not sure about the rest of the democratic world). Around election
time, you hear one rallying cry taken up on all sides around you in the form of trite
slogans: “Get Out and Vote!” “Make Your Voice Heard!” These slogans have begun to
irritate me to no end, not because of what they advocate—of course everyone in a
democracy should participate in the government—but because they are never balanced by
the necessary and complementary exhortations: “Know Your Candidates!” “Research the
Issues!” “Be Fair-Minded and Consider the Common Good, Rather than Only Your Petty
Passions!” The common slogans imply that the duty of voting is fulfilled in a single
event, that voting is just something you go out and do on election day. But in reality, the
democratic duty to vote is a continual duty, and it involves much more than most people
would like to believe. It requires consistent attention to happenings in the public world,
whether on the national, state, or local level, and thoroughgoing investigation of the
candidates in the period running up to the election. It also requires a serious attempt to
grasp all the complexities and nuances involved in highly controversial issues. In short,
the duty of voting demands both time and mental effort, yes, even a lot of each. But such
is the sacrifice we must make to live in a free society. To the extent that each of us fails
to make these sacrifices, we let ourselves be guided by forces above our heads, and we
cease to be free.
While we’re on the topic, I might as well point out that those forces over our
heads are often the very forces that give us the illusion of freedom of choice. I am
referring to the media, to the advertising campaigns of the politicians, and to the
government itself. These agencies do very little to facilitate informed decisions, and often
actively stymie rational deliberation. In general, it is fairly safe to say that any media
message is strategically designed to work on your passions and prejudices, for one side or
the other. And of course, there are only two sides to every issue. Every political matter,
down to the tiniest administrative detail, is immediately turned into a game of tug-of-war
by ultra-polarized politicians and pundits, so that one can never even get the facts
straight. And the PR teams of most politicians do their utmost to make their candidate’s
platform as vague as possible and to keep any bits of concrete information from creeping
into campaign advertisements and websites. The portraits of the candidates that we get
from them are, of course, meticulously crafted.
Where can one turn in this quagmire? It would be nice if one could find an agency
or publication with the express purpose of providing busy citizens with clearly organized,
objective information on political candidates and governmental proceedings, but to my
knowledge no such agency exists. Entrepreneurial types, take note—here is an enormous
gap in the information market, just crying to be filled. And it seems that the Internet was
made for such uses. But to hope for a truly objective political news source is probably to
search for the philosopher’s stone. In the present state of things, there are some sources
of honest information and voices of intelligent opinion within the media, but these are
few and hard to find. They mostly hide out in the written species of media—newspapers,
magazines, and books, on paper or online. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people pay
attention to these sources as they are drowned out by more insistent and illiberal voices
on the television and the radio.
Because of all the obstacles mentioned above, the best (maybe only) possible way
to be really informed about what you are voting for is to actually get involved in the
government and get know the candidates personally. Of course, that is pretty hard to do
on the national and even the state level, so your best bet is to start locally. Coincidentally,
the level of government that should affect your day-to-day life most directly (the local) is
also the level in which your voice can most easily have an actual impact. But
paradoxically, people seem to pay more attention to political matters the less power they
have to affect them. You may know everything there is to know about Barack Obama and
Sarah Palin, but can you even name your city council member or the mayor of your
town? I know I can’t.
Perhaps you might argue that the decisions of the federal government affect your
life much more than those of your municipal government. That may very well be the
case, but then we are faced with a different question: Is this how it ought to be? At any
rate, we know with certainty that it has not always been this way. Alexis de Tocqueville
observed that the strength and vivacity of the American democracy in the 19th century
depended on its highly local nature, centered around mostly autonomous townships. It
seems worrisome to me if the nation has gotten to the point at which the matters most
directly touching your home and your personal life are decided largely by people sitting
in a room thousands of miles away who have never been to your town and who cannot
possibly know its character and its needs. You “elect” these people, but you are forced to
do so based on projected facades and unreliable hearsay, for you have never had the
chance to meet them.
Now, back to why I didn’t vote. I make no claim to be the perfect citizen—far
from it. As I said, I don’t even know the names of any of my local representatives.
Laziness and neglect were part of the reasons why I didn’t vote in the midterms. If voting
is a duty, then I admit outright that I failed in that duty. But rightly recognizing the
problem is half of the solution. I failed because I failed to inform myself sufficiently
about the issues and the candidates over a period of time, not because I failed to check
some boxes on a piece of paper in some single instance of time. The reasons for this
failure were partially beyond my control, as I am a busy college student with little free
time to dedicate to following political news, and as the information needed to make an
informed and wise decision is not made easily available by either the media or the
candidates themselves. But my failure was also partially my own fault, as I could have
made more of an effort to learn about the political goings-on affecting the general public
rather than being so selfishly absorbed in my own college life.
The single-minded focus on increasing the quantity of votes is not an isolated
problem; it reflects a widespread, willful blindness to our nation’s most serious political
ills. Psychologically, it’s an easy phenomenon to explain. Our natural inclination as
humans is to avoid exertion whenever possible, and this applies no less to mental than to
physical exertion. That’s why we’re always trying to simplify issues that cannot really be
simplified, convincing ourselves that big problems are easy to solve. We want to believe
that if we just pitch in more money here or fire those people there, everything will come
up roses. This is the same reason why political discourse is so polarized now; it’s much
easier to fall back on a prepackaged platform than to actually have to do your own
thinking and research. That way you know who are the good guys and who are the bad
guys; everything is simple. What is this but sheer mental laziness?
So I admit that I failed in my democratic duty because I didn’t sacrifice enough
time and effort to bring myself to the level at which I felt sufficiently informed to vote;
but how much more do they fail in their duty who do not even recognize that they must
sacrifice much time and effort to bring themselves to this level? Was my failure any
worse than that of those who did vote, but voted for candidates they had never even heard
of based on mere party prejudice, or voted for candidates based on judgments they had
formed hastily from a few vague impressions gotten from TV or YouTube? Let us call
things what they are. If shortcoming is shortcoming, and failure is failure, than the vast
majority of those who vote also come short of the mark for a responsible citizen of a
democracy and fail in their democratic duty.
I realize that I am setting the mark extremely high, but a dose of idealism may be
just what the illness calls for. Someone in a democracy has to stand up for virtue and
excellence over mediocrity. I also realize that if my reasoning were put into practice,
almost nobody would allow themselves to vote. Or worse yet, the best and wisest men
and women, who are able to contemplate their own ignorance, would not vote, leaving
the vote entirely to the most foolish segments of the population. When I discussed my
argument in this essay with a friend, he replied, “But Joey, you’re probably more
knowledgeable about the candidates than a lot of the people who do vote!” I do not
dispute this point. This is why I am not recommending my decision as a pragmatic course
of widespread action. No person can presume to decide for any other person at what point
he or she is knowledgeable enough to cast a responsible vote. Where would you draw the
line? It would have to be arbitrary, just as the voting age is arbitrary. Thus, the decision to
vote or not to vote must be a matter of conscience. I did not vote because, like Socrates, I
was conscious of my own ignorance in the field of politics. My conscience told me that it
would be irresponsible and pointless for me to vote given my level of ignorance. All I can
ask you to do is to carefully consider, before you go to the ballot box, how much time and
thought you have put into your decision, and whether you are carrying out your duty to
your country in the manner of a truly responsible, educated, and upstanding citizen. If the
answer is less than satisfactory, you can still vote if you want to, but you must by all
means make an effort to get closer to that ideal by the next election. And all do-gooders
with well-formed intentions and less well-formed reasoning faculties can stop pestering
everyone to vote. If people aren’t voting, there’s probably a good reason for it, and we’re
probably better off because of it.