The Impotence of Revenge Voting: Voting Against is a Failure

I have recently a declaration of the most insensible approach to voting I have experienced in my adult life. The idea, inasmuch as there is one separate from blind wounded anger, is this: by voting for a competitor to party A, then you will teach party A a lesson. By depriving a party of power, you will communicate your dissatisfaction, they will hear you, and they will act differently are the assumptions. This methodology I term “revenge voting” or “voting against”.

The problems with this approach are legion. To begin with, despite all hue and cry, there is not and never has been a “vote against” option in any political race, ever. The only option presented on any ballot is an option to vote FOR a candidate. Make no mistake — you can claim that you are “voting against” candidate A all day long, but in the end, if you vote for candidate B, then that is a vote for candidate B. It is recorded as such; it is tallied as such; candidate B sees how many votes he or she got; the only thing that endures when the election is over is the eternal record that remembers whom you voted for. By casting a vote for someone, you are casting a “yes” to what they are promoting, to what they stand for, to what they promise to do. “Voting against” is an illusion, because has every real-world outcome of voting for someone else.

Another problem is that the party “voted against” may or may not receive the message you are sending. Say that you vote against A by voting for B. The A party may not conclude that people disliked their candidate for your reasons; they may conclude that rather than running a person who is wishy-washy on abortion, for example, they need to run someone who endorses child-murder 110%. Sure, polling data is available, but that only goes so far. We all know how reliable polling data can be. So unless you have the numbers, the megaphone, or have some way of making sure that the A party understands what happened, you are not actually communicating your displeasure.

If by voting against someone, you end up voting for someone who endorses positions which you detest, what have you done but voted on purpose to undermine what you believe? That may or may not hurt the party voted against, but it always hurts you. You claim to want A, but vote for B, and then complain about B’s positions and principles? You got what you voted for, didn’t you? So in the end, voting against detonates personal integrity and subsumes the individual’s understanding of morality and justice to the childish penny-ante game of revenge.

Yet voting against is not even necessary. Depriving the offending party of your vote is the goal, correct? What they once had, they no longer have. You can send that message by simply not voting in that race, a move which saves both integrity and prevents endorsing principles you oppose. However, this kind of action requires consideration and is not driven by the angry, hateful, base emotion that climaxes only in voting for someone opposed to your interests.

All these are why I think that people who are able to pull the lever, or bubble in the dot, or cast their mark for someone opposed to what they believe in, do not believe in much. They are not bothered terribly by someone advancing something they oppose; they neither forgo meals nor lose sleep, but carry on in the same way as before. Voting is a Machevellian game to them, not a matter of advocating principles, and because they have no principles, gamesmanship rules the day.

This is why I feel nothing is lost by saying to those who think this way, like Samuel Adams long before, “Away with you. We never knew ye.”