Anthony Gregory on Voting

by Anthony Gregory, LRC Blog
Nov. 02, 2010

No one has a right to vote. Voting is not rooted in property rights, as all actual rights are, and is thus an entitlement. On the other hand, voting is a victimless crime — or at least voter fraud should not be punished by the state. So walking into a polling booth and marking more than one pieces of paper, in itself, is not a crime against person or property. The state should neither guarantee that people have access to voting, nor should it jail people for stuffing the ballot box. This would also further demystify voting and make its obvious fraudulence all the more obvious.

Since I think voting, in itself, is not an act of aggression, I do not think voting is in itself unlibertarian. On the other hand, it is certainly not a sacred right, nor should it be seen as an effective means of achieving liberty. Let’s say the Democrats lose even bigger today than everyone thinks they will. Big deal. I got over the Republican lies sometime in my mid-teens, having seen a couple years of the winners of the ’94 elections betraying freedom every chance they got. I don’t even believe in gridlock any more. Did the ’06 Democrats tame Bush’s warmongering? Will the ’10 Republicans hold Obama in check? I actually think we’ll go from having a persistent minority, united against Obama and filibustering everything, to a bipartisan atmosphere where all the moderate Republicans work with Obama to expand the state. The conservatives will tell us for the next two years that we just need a Republican president too. And we’ll be back to the Bush years, soon enough.

One last point: It is hilarious to me that almost everyone who believes in democracy is violently opposed to one side winning. When left-liberals talk about democracy, what they really mean is they favor Democrats to rule, but with the official consent of more than half the electorate. Democracy is simply a means of securing majority consent for the state, which all states need, at least in a tacit sense, if they are to persist. Democracies shore up oppression, rather than tempering it. But it would be better to have a more explicit single-party state, of all Democrats or all Republicans. It would be easier to recognize that the state is a violent, parasitic entity without the illusions afforded by the polling booth.













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