1:13pm. Last Friday. Tempe, Arizona. “Happy Election Day next week, your vote doesn’t matter, thanks for choosing!” I almost hear my double-stamped absentee ballot yell at me as I drop it into the mailbox. I frown and head across the street to eat lunch at SmashBurger with my friend.
We eat our food, look at the girls walking by, and talk about the upcoming election, deciding that the fries are delicious today, the girl in the white shirt is really cute, and the only people who can make the best choices for our lives is us.
Flash forward to the present, and we are here. Amongst the voter fraud, lying candidates, and the overall lack of common sense that both precedes and succeeds all elections. I almost feel ashamed to wear the “I Voted!” sticker of courage because it means that I, in fact, had none at all.
You see, asking a Libertarian to vote is like asking an atheist to say grace at dinner. Not wanting to seem out of place, he or she may stand up to pray for these thy gifts which we are about to receive, but, at the end of the meal, the atheist still realizes that these words did not make a difference.
Of course, everyone has a candidate they’d prefer. I do. The one less likely to inflate the dollar. The one less likely expand our empire. The one less likely to take the fruits of our labor. I mean, I would have voted for Hitler over Stalin, but does that really count as a choice?
It’s hard for me to vote for the Libertarian candidates because the probability that they’ll win in this current system is extremely unlikely. I’d prefer a Republican instead of a Democrat, but whom do I choose? The lesser of the two evils. This would be much less of a problem if we had instant-runoff voting.
Even if almost everyone stopped voting and the winning candidate got only .003 percent of our entire country’s population to vote for him or her, the morning headlines would read, “Victory by an outstanding 1 million votes!” If that’s not trickery, I don’t know what is.
The reason people vote is to choose the candidate who they believe will preserve their freedoms in the best possible way, but preserving freedom is an inner battle. And this is what I’m here to say: for as long as you live, you need not convince another human being that you deserve to be free. Liberty needs no justification; it never has and never will.
It’s important to realize that, when you cast your ballot, maybe a candidate will actually keep a campaign promise, but you’re inevitably voting for an increase in the cost of living, a reduction in personal liberty, and, worst of all, a commitment to obedience and acceptance of a broken, corrupt system that thinks it can help the world better than you can.
As for me, give me liberty or give me death.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
