Opinion: I didn’t vote because I didn’t want to play the game
By Jamie Garrett, Columnist
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
I didn’t vote yesterday, but that’s not what’s important today. Today, my thoughts and perspectives are more about the actual process of campaigning, voting, and waiting for the results that I watched other people dealing with for the past months up until last night.
To be fair, I wasn’t totally uninterested or disaffected by this election: I always maintained that our current president would remain our president and that Gov. Romney could kindly pack up his bags and peace out because he didn’t have much of a chance. These thoughts didn’t come from the actual positions of the individual candidates or some other sort of feeling that would be pertinent. My thoughts and sentiments came from my perspective on what the entire electoral process in America is: a game.
The electoral game is a numbers game, it’s an influence game, it’s a psychological mindf*ck game: more than anything, it’s a ridiculous game that no one has the perfect answer to, and yet it is the basis for making one of the “most important” decisions that our country can collectively make. Coming from the perspective of someone who had no real intention of voting, I got to watch and test the initial processes that make up the electoral game for the past few months and I learned some things that I’m sure will repeat themselves many, many times throughout my life when it comes to the political sphere.
One of the biggest lessons from this election is the concept of the electoral game as a numbers game, a mathematical puzzle. You saw it if you watched any news channel’s coverage of the election last night: they put a few confirmed numbers on the board, the keep you waiting in suspense for more numbers to come, they build up the tension until you’re about to explode, and then they finally give you some pay-out at the end. Whether that pay-out is good or bad is entirely up to the individual, but the game is easy enough to understand.
When I tuned in to CNN last night, the game being played was “make the Democrats sweat”: electoral votes from the majority of the south and chunks of the Midwest had been counted and Romney was beating Obama by some 21 electoral votes. This game seemed to be spelling out dire consequences, but I was lucky enough to be watching CNN with the editor of this paper’s opinion section who kept yelling “YOU HAVEN’T COUNTED CALIFORNIA” and it was always sure to set the rest of us back on track. Of course Romney doesn’t have a chance, guys! California, duh! I don’t mean that in a joking manner, I mean it in the sense that the coverage’s game was to keep you guessing, playing a cat-and-mouse scenario with the voting results. It’s TV. They have to worry about ratings. They have to tell a story.
Shifting gears to sentiments about the candidates, I know that there are probably some “real” statistics about this general feeling, but one of the big distinctions that I heard from people on both sides of the party was on the subject of why they were voting for who they were voting for. There is always the question of whether or not someone is voting for one candidate because they align with that candidate more than the other candidate or because they simply don’t support that other candidate. I’ll go out on a limb and generalize here: most of the Republicans that I talked to about this election were voting for Romney as a message of non-support for Obama rather than as a message of faith in Romney. I heard a lot of “we don’t want four more years of Obama”; I heard almost no “we want four years of Romney.” Some call it the lesser-of-two-evils argument; I call it being a petulant jerk.
I’ll turn this back on me now: I didn’t vote yesterday for a few reasons that range from me just being too lazy to fill out the necessary information to obtain and complete an absentee ballot to me aligning mostly with Gary Johnson and recognizing that a vote for a third-party candidate in America, while not being an “empty” vote, is a diminished vote. Aside from that, I just didn’t want to play the game, man. I had friends of mine tell me that I am a “bad person” for not voting, I had people tell me that I was “spitting on the graves” of dead soldiers who fought for my right to vote, and others maintained that not exercising my rights means that I don’t deserve them in the first place. These are all valid arguments. They also don’t affect me because here’s my perspective: I don’t care who is president. The position has little import to my life, MY LIFE. It’s an entirely selfish position, but it’s true. The fact of the matter, to me, is that my vote’s “power” is for people who are not straight white men.
What it comes down to is that the candidate who I thought would do the best job was a third-party candidate – a libertarian republican who ended up endorsing Obama – but beyond that I had no strong feelings about either of the major party candidates. Call me stupid, call me uninformed, call me un-American, say whatever you need to, but my decision to not vote was entirely my own decision and, to me, it was the better decision than casting a vote for someone that I don’t fully support simply because it is the “accepted” thing to do. That being said, here’s to four more years of one of the coolest guys to ever occupy the Oval Office. Brobama abides.
