Should You Vote At All?

In Australia, the government forces you to vote.

In the US, fewer people vote every year.

If you don't vote (or wouldn't), do you have any room to complain at all?

Consider this:

You are not allowed to vote for whomever you want.

You are forced, by law in most states and in federal elections, to vote for one of two candidates, who are selected, despite primaries, more or less by the Establishment of each of the two ruling parties.

Take the '96 elections. The options were:

A Democrat who:

1. Claimed to be a Conservative Democrat
2. Had more scandals in his first term than any president past
3. Therefore is of little use to either Liberals (who believe his claims of being non-Liberal) nor Conservatives (who believe he's actually Liberal, and worse; doesn't admit it...people respect nobody who won't stand on their principles to begin with)

or

A Republican who:

1. Was more responsible than most Liberals for the creation of the modern Big Government welfare/regulatory state.
2. Lied and claimed he was Conservative, because (in his words) "If you want a Ronald Reagan, I can be a Ronald Reagan".. though there were Democrats who'd opposed Reagan less than Dole had.
3. Therefore was of little use to either Liberals (who believed his claims of being non-Liberal) nor Conservatives (who believed he was actually Liberal, and worse;doesn't admit it...people respect nobody who won't stand on their principles to begin with)

...or, of course, voting for someone who was absolutely guaranteed to not be elected, more or less by law.

Some choice.

No wonder so few people chose to vote.

Why was this the choice? Because a complex set of laws, which are not constitutionally based at all (most of the Founders opposed the two party system), make having an effective third party almost impossible, and actually illegal in most states.

Did you know that there are laws in most states which ban putting any party on a ballot /except/ the two major parties, under normal circumstances?

Take Maryland...you must:

1. Get 10,000 signatures, or it will be illegal for voters to register for your party (unless it's Democrat or Republican, who need no signatures at ALL)
2. Even AFTER you get 10,000 signatures, it is illegal for any candidate to list himself on a ballot as a member of that party.
3. Every single voter who registers for a party other than Democrat or Republican will have his registration changed to "not declared" after the next election...ALL people who chose to register as Libertarian for example in 1994-1996 (thousands of them), are no longer counted, but are "un-declared". Ten thousand more signatures must be gotten in order to START COUNTING OVER AGAIN, only with new voter registrations, the old ones STAY undeclared unless they come in and change it all over again.
4. In order for any candidate to be allowed to put the name of their own party (with the two exceptions, of course) on the ballot when running for any office, their party must gather 70,000 signatures, even if he's running for a seat that covers, say, 1,000 voters.

So in 1996, only 12% of eligible voters, I understand, voted for Clinton.

Now, what if you had voted for one or the other of the candidates who might win?

Then Clinton, or Dole (same difference, pretty much), would have had a bigger mandate in being elected.

As it was, those people who wanted neither and refused to choose among evils guaranteed that whomever was elected would be a weak president.

If you're a Liberal, you can be happy, because you probably hate how Bill Clinton sticks to mostly supporting Conservative issues. This will mean that the next Democrat nominee is likely to be more "decently" Liberal. And you would have felt better, even if Dole won, because he would have been a weak president, instead of one with a huge mandate like that nasty ol' Reagan had.

If you're a Conservative, you can feel better that Clinton, whom you don't trust, is a weak president. And if Dole had won, his weakness would have guaranteed that in 2000 the Republican nominee would be more "decently" Conservative.

Whichever way the combination worked, you were better off if you didn't like the choice, because you sent a strong message (even if they pretend to ignore it), by making the winner weak.

When two Conservatives (a libertarian Conservative, Forbes, and a social conservative, Buchanan) were the obvious favorites of the Republican electorate, the Establishment of the party showed their corruption (and disdain for what the people actually want) by viciously attacking and destroying them, doing a better job than even the Liberals were doing. They forced a nominee who was almost universally undesired, but to whom the corrupt leadership owed the most favors.

The Democrats could be said to be even worse, in the sense that they did not EVEN ALLOW SOMEONE TO CHALLENGE CLINTON. If you're young, this may not seem strange to you...but it was the first time since the 1930s that this had happened, and of course that was FDR, with a powerful, corrupt administration (by our standards) in the middle of an economic collapse.

You were not allowed, in either party, to actually have a say in who was nominated...which means you didn't really have any say at all. You could choose from two people whom the Establishment had already found to be pretty much what they wanted.

At least you could just fail to vote, and make them weaker.

This is why Australia forces...that's right, forces its subjects to vote. It is illegal to not vote, thus ensuring that the government can pretend it actually has someone's support. I'll have some links here about the oppression of Australians in their freedom to choose not to vote, soon.

Talk about oppression, in India the government actually puts troops out to physically assault people who try to refuse to vote! Now if voting were simply a "freedom" and "right", would you be beaten for not doing it? Imagine being beaten for not having an abortion, or for not owning a gun! No, forcing you to vote is silencing your vote against the choices you're allowed to have.

Next time someone says you can't complain if you didn't vote, tell them that you would vote for neither Hitler nor Stalin if they were the only two people running who were allowed to win...that, if you had to vote between killing 10,000 two year old girls and 10,000 two year old boys, with no other option allowed to win, you wouldn't vote either, and that wouldn't mean you couldn't complain, at all.