If You Don’t Vote, You Can Still Complain As Much As You Want

It’s that time again, when cheerful boosters of political
participation start chirping a familiar Election Day tune:

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain!

This sentiment has become such a cliché you probably barely
notice it anymore, right? But it’s popping up everywhere from the
Santa Monica
Daily Press to random New
Jersey signboards.

In everyday life the admonition makes sense, of course: I asked
you what you wanted for dinner earlier today and you didn’t have
any good ideas, so now you’d better sit down, shut up, and eat your
tofu stroganoff, thankyouverymuch.

But this same notion, when applied to behavior at the ballot box
is actually a troubling perversion and conflation of the concepts
of consent and free speech. 

From my November 2012 Reason cover
story, “Your
Vote Doesn’t Count“:

For someone who complains about politics, policy, and
politicians for a living, the prohibition on complaining by
nonvoters strikes close to home. Again, this Election Day cliché is
intuitively appealing. If someone invests in an enterprise, we
generally recognize that he has more right than an outsider to
determine the course of that enterprise. And voting feels like an
investment: It takes time and perhaps costs money.

In his 1851 book Social Statics, the English
radical Herbert Spencer neatly describes the rhetorical jujitsu
surrounding voting, consent, and complaint, then demolishes the
argument. Say a man votes and his candidate wins. The voter is then
“understood to have assented” to the acts of his representative.
But what if he voted for the other guy? Well, then, the argument
goes, “by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to
abide by the decision of the majority.” And what if he abstained?
“Why then he cannot justly complain…seeing that he made no
protest.” Spencer tidily sums up: “Curiously enough, it seems that
he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said yes,
whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward
doctrine this.” Indeed.

Whether there is a duty to be civically engaged, to act as a
good citizen, is a separate question from the issue of voting. But
if such a duty exists, there are many ways to perform it, including
(perhaps especially) complaining. According to Mankiw’s argument,
the ignorant voter is a far less admirable citizen than the
serial-letter-writing Tea Partier who can’t be bothered to show up
on Election Day.

The right to complain is, mercifully, unrelated to any
hypothetical duty to vote. It was ensured, instead, by the
Founders, all of whom were extraordinary bellyachers
themselves. 

Read
the whole piece for handy replies to other Election Day
commonplaces, such as “every vote counts!” and “voting is a civic
duty” and “voting is fun.”