Why I Won't Vote

Why I Won't Vote

Jim Kavanagh

I will not vote in this presidential election.

It’s not just because I consider genocide a deal-breaker and refuse to choose between the clowns and criminals offered up by the duopoly. It’s because the whole electoral system is thoroughly rigged and corrupt. It’s not a matter of withholding my vote because there’s no acceptable candidate.  It’s a matter of a prior, prerequisite problem: whether, as a citizen, to withhold a vote because the lack of integrity of the electoral process makes a mockery of casting it.

I’ve written about my thoughts on voting in presidential elections in previous electoral cycles, and I’m going to draw on those previous essays here. Please go to the links below to see a fuller version of my position, with many more references.

As I said in my last essay on this election:

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College. It is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

There’s a fundamental fact of our election system that undermines all the standard ways we consider electoral strategies. With the proliferation of electronic voting machines and computerized tabulation systems, the electoral process is not only corrupted by all the influences leftists consistently criticize—the financial control of the plutocracy, media bias, unfair ballot laws, voter caging and suppression tactics, the two-party duopoly, etc.—it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense: it gives the voter no reasonable assurance, and no way of ever knowing, that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought s/he did. 

I can certainly understand the desire to vote for Jill Stein in this election, both in order to advance the third-party possibility by reaching the 5% threshold and to make Kamala and the Democrats lose—and know they lost—because of their support of the Gaza genocide. But that only works if your vote for Jill Stein is counted for Jill Stein.

It is foolish to ignore how electronic voting systems affect what third-party voting might actually accomplish. Third-party votes are no longer just brave markers of political dissidence; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 5% to 2%, and Kamala or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory.

The American Farce Unravels: Shreds of January 6th

 

Crazy House in Dalat, Vietnam/boodhua

The storming of the Capitol on January 6^th by Trump supporters was an acceleration in the unraveling of the American political regime and the fantastic ideology that sustains it. Unfortunately, the likeliest result, in the short term at least, is that the regime will knit itself a tighter coat of control, with the help, sadly, of a large number of professed “progressives” who are rushing to bolster an imperial center that cannot, and should not, hold.

This event, which featured a cast of costumed characters that turned the Capitol into the Mos Eisley Cantina for a couple of hours, was the culmination of five years of farcical politics increasingly unhinged from the ability to think reasonably about, let alone effectively address, the real dangers and injustices accumulating in our country and the world, The groundwork of that was decades of the Fox vs. CNN/MSNBC universe of mutually-assured ideological degradation.

Press TV Discussion of Trump's Second Impeachment Vote (1/14/2021)

My appearance on Press TV as Trump's second impeachment vote concludes. (I come in ~12:30)

US House of Representatives reaches enough votes to impeach Trump

Critical Hour Discussion of Protests, Provocateurs, and Elections (6/12/2020)

Minnesota Government Asks Whether Outsiders, White Supremacists Lit Fires in Twin Cities

It’s Friday, so that means it’s panel time.

A very interesting article ran Friday in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Who Set the Fires in the Twin Cities?" It reads, "Ever since protesters flooded the streets following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, residents here have wondered: Who burned down so many businesses in the Twin Cities, and why? While a few arrests have been made so far, the question continues to go largely unanswered. ... The ATF [US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] has released photos and videos, asking for the public’s help in identifying suspects caught on security cameras lighting fires, pouring accelerants and throwing an apparent Molotov cocktail. ... Minnesota state officials have pointed to unspecified and unconnected outsiders, including white supremacists, anarchists and drug cartels for turning peaceful demonstrations into violent riots that left scores of businesses looted, damaged or destroyed by flames." That’s an interesting narrative to me. US President Donald Trump has described protestors as thugs, playing into a racist stereotype from what’s been displayed in the media.
[Related article: Over the Rainbow: Paths of Resistance after George Floyd]

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (11/1/2019)

Contrary to Mainstream Media Reports, Slowdown Begins: Are We Close to Recession?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported, "The US economy cooled over the summer, growing at a 1.9 percent annualized pace from July through September, the latest sign that the slowdown is deepening. Economists anticipated slightly weaker growth following President Donald Trump’s decision to dramatically expand his trade war with China." On Friday, the Post reported, "The United States added 128,000 jobs in October as the jobless rate ticked up to 3.6 percent, outperforming analyst forecasts during a month in which one of the largest private-employer strikes in recent years weighed on the economy."

Prime Directive: Trust the System, Blame the Russians

There are increasing doubts about the trustworthiness of America’s now ubiquitous electronic voting systems. For all the reasons I put forth in my previous post, including the suspicious results in the Democratic primary this year (analyzed in detail in a Stanford study), wider swaths of the public are aware and concerned about whether voters can have confidence that their votes will be counted for whom they are cast.

So the establishment media had to address this issue in some way. I guess that’s why the New York Times put David E. Sanger and Charlie Savage on the case, with their September 14^th article, “Prime Danger in Vote Hack: Sowing Doubt.”

As the title indicates, the prime objective of this article is to allay any doubt voters might have about the reliability of the American electoral process, while at the same time acknowledging (kinda, sorta) that there’s some “danger” involved in the opaque, proprietary technologies that now determine the outcome of our elections. It’s a tricky needle to thread, and the convoluted and self-contradictory argument they use to do it is woven around the first two words of the article: “Russian hackers.”

Strike the Vote

As we enter the final lap of another quadrennial presidential horserace, let’s consider again the question of how to vote. This is not just a question of whom to vote for; it is also a question of whether to vote at all. Before deciding whom to vote for, we must, and do (explicitly or implicitly) make a decision about the electoral system that solicits our participation. We should make that decision explicitly, based on a clear-eyed understanding of how the electoral system actually now works.

It's my reluctant but considered conclusion that, in the United States of America today, the only effective way to use one's own vote is by withholding it. An organized, public boycott of the presidential election is, I think, the only tactic, within the electoral process, that might provoke important reforms—including of the electoral process itself—that would make other advances possible.

To be clear, I think voting is a fundamental political right. I have seen how people who don’t have that right fight for it, embrace it, and go to extraordinary lengths to use it.  Although electoral politics is only one aspect of a thoroughgoing democratic polity and of individual political engagement, it is hard to conceive of a democratic schema in which a transparent, trusted voting process was not important. It may be one among many, but a vote is an important political tool, and a terrible thing to waste.

There’s also the noteworthy fact that without honest, transparent elections, there is no possibility of significant change by non-violent means.

That’s why I have always made sure to register and vote. For me, in American presidential elections, the most un-wasteful use of my vote has been for some third-party candidate or party whose politics I could actually support. No matter how few votes that candidate got, I thought it was important that support for an alternative politics – substantively left and at least quasi-socialist – be registered and recognized. In the present case, the Stein-Baraka ticket and the Green Party would be such an alternative. 

At this point, however, given what the American electoral system has become, I have concluded that, even in these limited terms, voting for a third party is no longer a politically relevant gesture.

Bernie's End

Today, the morning after the Associated Press and other media outlets declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee. Glenn Greenwald gave the perfect headline: 

Perfect End to Democratic Primary: Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner Through Media

On the one hand, I understand why Bernie supporters are pissed-off about the media making this announcement on the eve of the California primary (taking place as I write). Bernie defeating Hillary in California would demonstrate her political weakness (always a good thing). Today’s announcement will likely depress the vote and make that less likely, and it would be naïve not to suspect that this announcement was made because someone wanted just that.

On the other hand, what we’re seeing here is only the reality of the Democratic Party made blatant. Pace Bernie and his supporters, the problem here is not that the media is reporting about superdelegates and how they say they’re going to vote. The problem is the superdelegate system itself, and what it exemplifies about the Democratic Party. Sandernistas love to show the math and the dates, and insist that, really, the 750 superdelegates have not yet voted. But the reality here—the political math—is that Bernie is not going to persuade hundreds of superdelegates to switch to him. The political reality is that those superdelegates were put in place to prevent someone like him from ever getting the nomination. And they are going to do their job. For which they are well paid in various ways. Bernie and his supporters are running into the Democratic Party wall, and they don’t want to hear it.

It’s not the media, but the Sanders campaign, that is perpetuating a diversionary myth—in this case, about who and what the superdelegates are. They are, in the main, not political actors amenable to reason or ethics in figuring out who is the best candidate, but agents of the money and power interests that control the Party, appointed to vote as those interests wish. Which is worse: To report the political truth or perpetuate a political myth? 

Election Choices: What to Do Instead

[Escape from New York delayed completion of this post this until after election night. All the better. Now that the great danger has been dodged, let’s look to the future.  Advisories: 1) I’m talking here about presidential elections.  2) You really have to see the videos.]

Having made the case against voting for Obama in a previous post, it’s only fair for me to suggest the alternative. 

I value the right to vote as fundamental.  I have seen how people who don’t have that right fight for it, and how people who get it for the first time eagerly embrace it, and go to extraordinary lengths to use it.  Although I consider electoral politics only one aspect of a thoroughgoing democratic polity and of individual democratic engagement, it would be hard to conceive of a democratic schema, no matter how revolutionary, in which a transparent, trusted voting process was not important.  It may be one among many, but a vote is an important political tool/weapon, and a terrible thing to waste.