Vote for The Sake of Voting

For most of us, voting is the extent of our civic engagement. But on both sides of the Atlantic, voting seems distinctly out of fashion. The UK’s last general election recorded fewer voters than any in the last quarter-century. In the United States, marked by endemic abstention, turnout has been on a decline since an all-time high in the mid-2010s. Much of this has to do with unpopular parties and downright repellent politicians, but I argue some of this is apathy on our part as voters: too many average citizens, especially of our generation, feel their vote isn’t worth waiting in line to cast. 

It’s true that your ballot will be drowned by millions of other ballots in most elections. There are over 48 million potential voters in the UK, and 244 million in the US, which means your chances of breaking a tie are statistically nil. However, I argue that there are reasons to vote that aren’t dependent on yours being the tiebreaker. Instead, we have an obligation, as citizens, not to be complicit in the bad things our leaders do, and even if we are totally satisfied with the moral standards of our politicians (which is admittedly an unlikely thing), voting remains the essential way we interact with the powers that be. 

Voting is usually understood as a positive act. We vote for a politician or policies because we want them to prevail. I argue that it makes more sense to do the opposite, to vote for the least bad candidate on the stage. Assuming that governments are necessarily unjust on some level (which is hard to deny, considering the headlines on almost any given day), we should seek to avoid complicity with corruption, war, discrimination, or anything else we blame our leaders for. That injustice isn’t on our hands, of course, but we nonetheless have an obligation to stop the wrongdoings of the state when we can, and educated voting is perhaps the easiest way to ensure that we are not bystanders to it. It’s not the outcome of the election that matters, but the state of our consciences. 

There is a more abstract reason to vote as well. Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, some kind of civic or political engagement has been considered a crucial part of a life well lived. Aristotle considered this capacity for political life to be the singular feature that distinguishes humanity from animals. “Someone living the best life must do so in relation to others, in a polis (city),” he writes, “since humans are social creatures.” Along similar lines, the contemporary Scottish philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre argues that political participation is an important part of being a good person. Communities, including political communities, are made of obligations to other people; as individuals, we share those obligations to the communities we are a part of, including structures of government. MacIntyre’s argument also refers to protesting, but to those of us too busy (or too lazy) to stand in the picket line, voting is the most accessible means of political participation.

As nice as it may be to claim political agnosticism and scroll reels instead of heading to the polling station (or the post office, as the case may be), we have a duty to ourselves and our communities to ensure democracy rumbles on. Austria has a much higher voter turnout than either the UK or the US. Just last month, a presidential candidate for the national Beer Party won over eight per cent of the vote, contrary to all expectations: it goes to show that when we vote for the sake of voting, we get politics worth supporting.

Image from Wikimedia Commons