November 4, 2008

Why Voting Matters

I should be eating lunch right now, but instead I am writing this blog entry. 

I have never had a blog, mainly because most of my writing is reactionary and I don’t have the free time. This too is a piece of reactionary writing, but I put it in blog form for two reasons:

  1. The topic is carried over from Twitter, and 180 characters is too few for me to say what I have to say.
  2. There are apparently a lot of online writings devoted to bad logic and poor analogies defending what I’m arguing against.

Today, Election Day, someone I follow on Twitter posted a comment about how they weren’t voting, with this URL attached as some kind of supporting argument: http://www.reason.com/news/show/32846.html

They then proceeded to add the following URLs as support for this position:

Chiming in with support was someone else, characterizing those of us attempting to challenge this view as jumping on the “vote fetishizing bandwagon”.

It’s honestly hard to know where to start with this stuff.

To fetishize something is to have an excessive and irrational commitment or obsession with it. To characterize the belief that voting is important as either irrational or excessive is not only illogical, it is insulting and flies in the face of recorded human history.

The colonists rallied around the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” because they felt it was unfair to be taxed and have no say in the running of government. In the years both prior to and after the American Revolution, we have seen people in numerous other countries fight and die for the right to vote.

It is literally impossible to list all the benefits you and I enjoy in our lives because of democracy. Leaving alone the advances made by humanity over our history thanks to democracy, in our current government the people we elect to represent us in office make laws on our behalf, appoint judges to courts whose decisions become legal precedent, choose how to spend the large amount of money removed from our paychecks in the form of taxes, decide when and where to deploy the military, which means they decide when our fellow citizens in the military will be placed in harm’s way.

Florida in the year 2000 is a great example of why voting is so important. Had more people in this country bothered to participate in our democracy, the election would likely not have hinged on Florida, a Florida recount would arguably not have been necessary, the intervention of the Supreme Court would not have been necessary, and we might not presently be 9 TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT thanks to the actions of the man put into office as a direct result of the apathy of the non-voting public.

Presently in California there are a number of measures on the ballot that impact the citizens of this state. One in particular, Proposition 8, will enshrine discrimination against an entire class of people in the state constitution if it passes. 

Facile analogies comparing voting to gambling in the face of an issue like Proposition 8 fall completely apart. This is a concrete example of a case where a person’s inaction could directly result in the removal of people’s civil rights.

An apocryphal quote attributed to British philosopher Edmund Burke says that all evil needs to triumph is for good people to stand idly by and do nothing. Given the actions undertaken in our name over the last 8 years, and the issues at stake in the current election, advocacy for not participating in this democracy is to advocate for standing idly by.

Like it or not, we live under a representative government. We can either take advantage of what little say we do have, or we can be apathetic and dismiss the democratic process as being immune to our influence. Our history is filled with examples that show the fatuousness of the latter position. Benjamin Franklin said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. One way of exercising vigilance is by helping decide who sits in positions of authority.

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