Don’t vote… yet

You heard me. Despite being torn three or more ways between candidates telling you to vote for them, hold back until you’ve heard what I have to say (assuming you have a voice in your head when reading this), or even completely. This article is no more than twelve hours from being too late for this year, but should serve well for next year’s elections and beyond.

Democracy is the best of a truly awful set of government options: for it to work properly you need a populace that’s not only impartial and properly informed, but intelligent and humble enough to know when their opinion is completely unwarranted. Yeah, everyone has the right to their opinion, blah blah blah. Claiming otherwise would paint you as some demon advocate against free speech. I couldn’t care less about everyone having their own opinion on a topic, but for two things: not all of them are sufficiently informed and not everyone is capable of dismissing ignorance or propaganda. Either problem by itself would be solved by the absence of the other; and solving the latter is a hell of a lot harder, so here’s what you do.

...if you think elections are a popularity contest, kindly step away from the booth

If you don’t have any good reason to vote, don’t. If you can’t handle telling your friends that you didn’t vote then just lie about it, praying nobody hacks the elections to de-anonymise the whole thing. “But it’s your right to vote! All the people who died in the struggle to have your voice heard would be disgraced! If everyone stopped voting, we‘d have another Hitler in power!” Sure, prove Godwin’s Law yet again. And sure, all of us here have a right to vote. A duty, some might even say. This is where people are wrong. Your duty is to make a vote that matters – one that is based on a critical review of each of the candidates. So in fact, your real responsibility is to put your brain into gear during elections to think properly about how to spend your vote, rather than blindly choosing someone because they hounded you the most over Twitter or Facebook. At best, your vote is completely random, hence inconsequential. At worst, you’re favouring a candidate for the wrong reasons at the expense of someone better.

I will confess that the “properly informed” pre-requisite is quite hard to achieve: not only does a campaigning length of two weeks hardly provide sufficient information, but the candidates themselves could be running for a slew of unfavourable reasons that can be hard to filter out. Not to mention that if you’re slick enough with your public relations you can completely hoodwink enough people to win an election. Impartiality is trivial in governmental elections but called into question when the chances are you might personally know a few of the candidates. In my experience, it’s the people who aren’t particularly enthused by elections that tend to say that they’re going vote for the guy they know – if you’re one of them, just remember that they don’t know if you actually voted, and any brownie points you gain are minimal when you consider you are just one among dozens of friends and potentially thousands of voters. You might argue that if one vote is insignificant, then there’s no harm – which is true until others start thinking the same. In short, if you think elections are a popularity contest, kindly step away from the booth and into your nearest autocratically governed student body.

The frenzy surrounding elections is sure to dazzle and disorient you (I know I feel like that), but before giving in to the rainbow of posters, tweets, Facebook updates, human pyramids, flyers and free sweets to vote against RON, take a step back and think about whether you should even bother.