or miscounted , unverifiable vote for somebody they can ' t hold accountable . They never bothered to find out what voting is supposed to be about and yet they think that they ' re not apathetic because they belong to a political party and vote .
10 . IF YOU DON ' T VOTE , YOU ' RE HELPING THE OTHER PARTY
No , * you * are . By voting for an opposition party , a third party , an independent , or even writing in None of the Above , Nobody , Mickey Mouse , your own name , or yo mama , you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins , not by the candidate you voted for . If there is a 50 % turnout , the winning candidate can claim that 50 % of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance .
11 . IF WE DON ' T VOTE , OUR VOTES WILL NEVER BE COUNTED AND WE ' LL HAVE NO LEVERAGE
True , if we don ' t vote , our votes will never be counted . But how does hoping that our votes * might * * sometimes * be counted , provide leverage ? The election just held in the UK had only a 32 % turnout . Where people did vote at all , since UK votes actually have to be counted , they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties ( George Galloway ' s Respect Party for one , the Pirate Party for another ) and in Edinburgh , a guy who ran dressed as a penguin , calling himself Professor Pongoo , got more votes than leading major party candidates . That ' s leverage , but it is only possible when the votes have to be counted and are verifiable . Those conditions do not apply i n the US .
12 . THE CHOICE IS BULLETS OR BALLOTS , SO IT ' S A NO-BRAINER
The Department of Homeland Security has just used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted , to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens . Your ballots authorized those bullets . There is a third option : not voting , not fighting , but simply withholding our consent . That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesn ' t represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed . It is a legal , nonviolent , effective option called noncompliance . Noncompliance can take other forms , such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems , but these cannot delegitimize a government . Since governments derive " their just powers from the consent of the governed ," withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us .
13 . EVIL PEOPLE ARE SPENDING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON VOTER SUPPRESSION TO DENY MINORITIES THE VOTE , AND PEOPLE HAVE FOUGHT AND DIED FOR THE RIGHT TO VOTE , SO THE VOTE MUST BE VALUABLE
Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote . While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation , they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets . If they didn ' t want people to vote , those proportions would be reversed and they ' d be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote . Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them , their uncounted , unverifiable votes for oligarchs who won ' t represent them , must be valuable . end of article
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