1. Reform is the biggest enemy of revolution and the electoral system is the essence of reformism. Voting gives the impression of participation and change, yet it is the backbone of a society based upon alienation and boredom. Voting lures us away from the real task of demolishing the existing institutions. In the short term we get token, pacifying reform, and in the long run we get the same ding-dong electoral repetition.
2. To vote is to accept the limits of your own power. It makes you as powerful (or powerless) as the cross on the ballot-paper. American democracy is the amassed power of several million opinions reduced to a whimpering and stifled cheer for the same masters we’ve had all of our lives.
3. There is nobody who can run your life better than yourself. You don’t need other people to vote for you to prove it. So why then should you give others the power to decide how you should run your life?
4. There are those who would vote, yet still be active in the struggle for real change. They are like vegetarians working in slaughterhouses.
5. Voting is the excuse we need to avoid organizing ourselves, to avoid creating our own alternative. Voting is accepting that the power of the state is preferable to the power of the individual and the power of the community.
6. The weight and force of the blow of a policeman’s truncheon does not change when the truncheon is painted a different color. All democratic institutions are ‘law and order’ institutions.
7. Voting is a clever way of getting you to sign your name to a whole series of measures, when in fact you were only aware of three or four of them. Thus, your vote is your personal approval of every single policy carried out by the party you vote for, without exception. By the time the elected party has spent a year in the office, you won’t even recognize the measures you voted for – but you will be subject to the laws and restrictions imposed through each and every decision made by that government.
8. Voting for the lesser of two (or more) evils perpetuates the biggest evil of all: the evil of stasis, a world where all change is superficial. Invariably this means that we eagerly vote in order to grasp the available entertainment of politicians walking tightropes between popularity and personal wealth and comfort.
9. Voting Democrat legitimizes not only the system of government we have now, it also legitimizes the pendulum-style inevitability of the electoral process… and thus gives the Republicans credibility as simply the other side of the bad penny. (No matter how many times you flip the coin, it will never land on it’s edge. The Democrat / Republican Alliance exists in the no-hope land between left and right, and voting for it only strengthens the swinging regularity of the elections). Voting for the Conservative Republicans in the hope that ‘If they get in, the people will rise’ is a mistake. Electorally-gained power is also a mandate to allow them to increase the effectiveness of their resistance-crushing machinery. Voting Libertarian gives them the mistaken idea that their ideas can travel through Congress and come out at the other end actually meaning something. Surely it’s far better to encourage real change – which can only happen outside of government.
10. Voting is slapping a preservation order on corruption, inequality, and mass-manufactured boredom. In short, voting is the blinding of the people, by the people.
Refusing to vote is a personal decision to have nothing to do with the dated, oppressive, and crippling system. Not voting is positive, not negative. Voting is an end; refusing to vote is a beginning.
Originally written by Chumbawamba, 1987 (yes, them)
Updated & Americanized by Anok & Peace, 1992 (yes, them)
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