Five Reasons Not to Vote

by Jim Davies 

Once again, as Election Day approached the mantra intensifies: never mind for whom, but vote! It's your birthright, etc etc. For those troubled by a vague feeling that they are being hornswaggled, I write to offer comfort.

1. A first reason for not voting carries no weight with me personally, for I happen to be one who likes thinking outside the box and making up my own mind; but I mention it because it's - well, popular: not-voting is the popular thing to do. Anyone who likes doing what the majority does and being one of the winners, should therefore avoid voting.

Here are the round numbers of non-voters, out of our 280 million population:

30% aren't allowed
20% don't register
20% don't bother
----
70% stay home

The remaining 30% take part in the circus and about half of those (16% of the whole, or about 1 in 6) vote for the victor, who then governs all 100% for the next 4 years; only in the fairyland of democratic theory can this be called "majority rule."

2. My second reason for not voting is that it's a waste of time because the outcome of the election is rigged anyway. By "rigged" I don't mean that the actual victor is chosen in advance or that the figures are fabricated or that the ballots are mishandled (though that did happen in 1960) but just that the Republicrat machinery is  so powerful that all rivals are effectively excluded; for certain in practice, the winner WILL be either Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee. Example: in St Louis, rivals Badnarik and Cobb attempted to enter the debate building to serve legal papers on the Debate Commission to protest their exclusion from the debates; but they were promptly arrested.

You never heard of Badnarik or Cobb? - that's precisely my point.

3. My third reason for not voting is that, relatively, it's dangerous--because the chance that one vote out of the 84 million cast will affect the outcome is much lower than the probability of being accidentally killed en route to the polling place.  We all take risks every day, of course; but if you hold life precious, make sure to spend all your moments doing something worth while.

4. My fourth reason for not voting is that voting is immoral because by participating in a thoroughly immoral system, the voter endorses it. A friend of mine used to wave at polling booths on Election Day the banner "THIS IS A DEN OF CRIMINALS" and although strictly speaking he was wrong because the criminals have defined "crime" as only an act of disobedience to one of their laws, his point was clear enough. 

Is the system immoral?--certainly it is, and not only for Reason 5 below. It's immoral because of Reasons 1 and 2 above (it permits and promotes Minority Rule) and because it has over its two-century life produced appalling suffering and privation and discord and 
premature death. Supporters like to say America's is the best system in the world, and they may be right--but only in the sense that all other political systems are even worse.  To select just one narrow issue out of thousands, for 60 years successive Federal Governments, duly elected by possibly thoughtless voters, have actively supported a foreign government (the State of Israel) against its neighbors who, not surprisingly, became enraged at America and from among whom came 19 men, that dreadful day three years ago, to wreak vengeance and retribution.

This attack US politicians uniformly but mendaciously and hypocritically described as "unprovoked" and went on a rampage of warmongering to hit back in what will no doubt become an endless war of strike and counter-strike; as I write, 6 more Americans were killed yesterday trying to carry out the benighted wishes of the Demopublican cabal the voters put in power while all the while, those pin-striped, practiced liars call the whole enterprise "Defense." So wedded is the cabal to continuing this endless war that the 
"challenger" has thrown away an excellent chance to win the upcoming election by promising to bring it swiftly to an end.

5. My fifth reason not to vote (and the one that, for me, towers above all others combined) is that voting directly and necessarily violates human rights.

"Human rights" are those rights inherent in human beings, and all derive directly from the fundamental right of self-ownership. A human being is a creature who has, by right, 100% control over his or her own life. Every human has this right, and all those logically derived from it; consequently (consequently; no, this is not an exception but it follows directly and expressly) every human being has the right not to be ruled in any slight degree by somebody else; or in other words, no human has any right to rule another.

Yet government, and the voting process by which it is perfumed and disguised, is in the exclusive business of ruling others. Therefore, it is in the business of violating this fundamental human right, and therefore voting for it violates human rights.

The very act of pulling a lever, or writing an "X", or punching out a chad, is an act of violence against our fellow humans; it is an act which says, for a common example, "I know full well that I have no right to steal my neighbor's money to pay for my child's education, so I want you, Ms Candidate, to go do it for me."

And somehow, in the mysterious shell-game of democratic political theory, a power that does not exist in reality is conjured up out of nothing whatever by the process of voting. Our right to govern others is zero; and in real-life math, a million times zero is still zero. Only in the magic math of political myth does a million times zero equal something greater than zero.

It is 100% fraudulent; your neighbor's 20-year old son has by right 100% control over his own life, yet by the strong magic of voting, he can be made to surrender that right to your will and be made to go kill Iraqis of whom he has never heard. Yes, I know the draft is suspended; I also know it can be restored if and when the political cabal thinks it "necessary" and I know the voter is writing it a blank check to do exactly that, by the very act of voting.

The absolute and basic right of self-ownership was elegantly written in to the Declaration of Independence: ". . . all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life . . ." What a tragedy that when the authors, themselves politicians, continued by writing without apparent intentional irony or disapproval "To secure these rights, governments are instituted . . ." nobody noticed that they had just constructed a gigantic contradiction. If individual humans own their own lives 100% (and we certainly do, or else we are sub-human) then the very last way to protect us and our rights is to set up someone to "govern" us, thereby violating the very right he is supposed to protect!

We've noticed it now, though, dear Reader, you and I; and on November 2nd, you can start to do something about it: stay home. Already, 70% of us stay home; at some stage between now and when 99.9% of us stay home, the humongous, bloodthirsty fraud that voters endorse will collapse of its own weight and a new era of peace, freedom and prosperity will begin.