Your Votes. Do. Matter.

Guest Post from Neera K. Badhwar

The following is a guest post from my friend, Dr. Neera Badhwar.  I was unsure about posting this as I want to keep PSL non-partisan and want to be—and be perceived to be—as fair to all who might disagree.  That includes being fair to both Democrats and Republicans, regardless of who they vote for.  Neither Neera nor I are Democrats or Republicans (of any sort).  We both tend to agree with some things Democrats believe and some things Republicans believe.  We are, in some sense, neutral parties. (See this earlier post for an explanation.)  That does not mean we don’t take sides when we think a side is clearly right (or clearly wrong).  In this piece, Dr. Badhwar clearly indicates she thinks one side in the currently likely presidential contest is significantly worse than the other.  If you think she is wrong, that’s ok. If you want to comment on the piece, you are welcome to do so.  I’m happy to have genuine civil discourse about the issue appear here.  That means, of course, being respectful and dealing honestly with the actual claims, evidence, and arguments.  Honest disagreement is welcome. Dishonesty and unnecessary rudeness is not.

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“Let’s start with the basics. Your vote does not matter. Your Vote. Does not. Matter” (see here).

So begins a column by two influential and smart libertarians, Aaron Ross and Trevor Burrus. They say it’s a waste of time to vote because your single vote can’t make any difference to the outcome. Many other influential and smart libertarians, such as Chris Freiman and Bryan Caplan, argue likewise.

And they are right: your single vote cannot make a difference to the outcome, whether your vote is for the candidate who seems to be winning, or for the candidate who seems to be losing. Your vote is like a grain of sand added to a pile of sand. As Ross and Burrus point out, “No single vote has ever decided a presidential election” (or, it is worth adding, a primary election).

Unlike one more vote, however, every column, op-ed, article, or lecture by an influential libertarian arguing against voting can lead to tens of thousands, indeed, millions, of liberty-minded readers withholding their votes against the demagogue who openly proclaims that Presidents are above the law. Libertarian authors or lecturers who argue against voting as a waste of time talk as though they are addressing only one person. But they are addressing everyone in their audience, people who may number in the millions. It’s not Donald Trump’s impassioned followers who will take their argument against voting seriously, but those who oppose him. Trump’s supporters will flock to the polls to anoint the would-be dictator, driven by a hatred of “the other side,” or a desire for revenge against their “enemies,” or fear of immigrants, or hostility to free trade and women’s reproductive rights.

If influential libertarians were to argue in favor of voting and set an example by voting themselves, they could get millions to vote, and those millions could get millions more to vote. These millions of votes would count the most in local and state elections, of course, but they would also count in the primaries, and thus in the choice of presidential candidates. These millions added to the tens of millions of votes by others who see the dangers of another Trump Presidency could save our country from Trump’s grip.

Libertarians who encourage liberty-minded voters to sit on their hands are indirectly helping Donald Trump to win.

If good arguments for liberty were enough, demagogues wouldn’t arise and we wouldn’t have to vote against them. It’s now obvious, however, that even thousands of op-eds, blogs, articles, and books by many hundreds of libertarians have failed to prevent the rise of a demagogue in a country with the largest number of libertarians. After 150 years of libertarian writings, 235 years of a written Constitution that explicitly protects individual rights, and 350 years of classical liberal writings defending individual rights and toleration, we now have a self-proclaimed authoritarian and lover of dictators set to become the next President with the enthusiastic support of hundreds of millions of voters. All of whom, we should note, will be casting just one vote each.

Libertarians are right that it’s a waste of time to vote when all the candidates for a given position are equally bad. But that is not the case when one of the candidates admires and wants to model himself on a Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán, and uses the language of Hitler and Mussolini. We need political action to defeat such people. Slavery was ended not by abolitionists’ intellectual and moral arguments alone, but also by the electoral victory and actions of an (admittedly imperfect) anti-slavery President, Abraham Lincoln.

This brings me to another argument against voting, viz., that it makes you complicit in the oppressive actions of the politicians you vote for, given that you know that some of their actions will diminish your liberty. So if you vote, you have some responsibility for these actions - even if you vote for said politician only in order to defeat the far worse candidate.

This argument is similar to that of the 19th century abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who argues in Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office under the United States Constitution? (1845) that even voting for an abolitionist, anti-war candidate makes you complicit in the oppression of the state (Abolitionism: The Schism Over Voting | Libertarianism.org). Why? Because all government officials have to take an oath to uphold the pro-slavery Constitution, and judges have to enforce its pro-slavery provisions, such as the Fugitive Slave law (Art. 4, sec. 2). Benjamin Tucker’s argument against voting appeals to the inherently oppressive nature of government: “Every man who casts a ballot necessarily uses it in offense against American liberty,” because it sanctions the government’s use of force against us. (Libertarian Perspectives on Voting | Libertarianism.org ). Casting a ballot makes one a criminal, “one who attempts to control another.”

However, if by voting for the better candidate you defeat the far worse candidate, surely you get credit for saving the country from the even more anti-liberty actions of the defeated candidate. And if the authoritarian candidate wins, surely everyone who sat on their hands shares responsibility for his victory and the disaster he promises to wreak on the country. You can’t always keep your hands clean by sitting on them.

Someone might object that even if it’s good to vote against an autocrat, not doing it is not morally equivalent to doing something bad. For example, not saving someone from the murderer’s clutches when you can do so easily is not morally equivalent to murdering him yourself. But this example doesn’t quite illustrate the issue under consideration. Doing nothing to stop the authoritarian candidate is analogous to letting the murderer kill the person, whereas voting for the better candidate is analogous to trying to save the person from the murderer. It’s perverse to think that doing nothing to save a person from a murderer leaves your hands clean, whereas trying to save him makes you responsible for whatever bad things he does in the future.

Even worse than doing nothing to save a person from a murderer is actually helping him to commit murder. This is analogous to what Trump’s eager voters are doing. They accept Trump’s lies about his “stolen” election and being the innocent victim of the criminal and civil charges against him, and they are unfazed by his admiration of dictators, his desire to be “President for life,” and his claim that Presidents are above the law. As Chris Freiman rightly points out, people who are biased, or ignorant of – or unconcerned about - the political and economic consequences of their positions, should not vote. But of course, precisely because these voters care little about the consequences of their positions, and deceive themselves about Trump’s character and intentions, they are not open to Freiman’s argument.

Freiman also argues that most people can do more good by engaging in effective altruism instead of spending time becoming au courant about the issues and gaining a basic understanding of economics, philosophy, history, and politics.

This is a good argument in normal times, when the choice between two bad candidates is no choice at all. But given the stakes in the current elections, everyone who faces the truth about Trump, and who knows commonsensically that dictators crush people’s liberties, knows enough to be justified in turning out to vote for whoever is running against Trump.

If you care about liberty, you should vote and encourage others to vote for the least anti-liberty candidate. Together, your votes count