Voting

 There is no reason to think that voting involves either

• consent to the general system of government, or
• consent to the government of the person you voted for, or
• support for the government you voted for, in any absolute sense.

The only thing which voting inherently involves is support for the government you voted for in preference to the alternatives, since that is the only thing which the act of voting can inherently do. Accordingly, it can only make you responsible for the actions of the government insofar as they are different from what the alternative would have been – and insofar as you could foresee them before voting.

Usually, support for not voting in leftist and libertarian groups comes from misinterpreting the act of voting in one of the three ways I listed above, or something like them. If you cannot, in good conscience, vote without thinking you are doing these things, then by all means don’t vote, but those meanings are entirely in your head.

It is true that voting does almost nothing, and that any time spent on advocacy about voting could probably be better spent on other advocacy, or other kinds of political action. If you live in a country where voting itself takes considerable effort, then the effort is probably better spent elsewhere. To that extent, there is something venerable about the voting-abstinence tradition in these political circles. But no further.