Is Voting A Crime?
The core question in this essay was inspired many years ago through a lecture from Eric WhoRU Williams. The argument presented here as follows, however, is my own exploration of where that question has lead me.
Defining The Terms
Before I take a deep dive into this lecture, I need to make it explicitly clear that this has nothing to do with what is legal or illegal. For all who know me enough, throughout my years of essays, I have never used legalities as a foundation, and likewise this essay is not going to rely on it.
When I use the word criminal I do not mean it in the legalese sense in any way shape or form, but in the moral and ethical sense. Someone who bears responsibility for empowering or participating in acts that would otherwise be considered crimes. These crimes are those actions of which cause harm to a victim's reputation, such as defamation, or direct violence ,to their own person or theft of property and through scamming them.
Again, Crimes, as I use the term, are actions that violate another person's life, liberty, property, or reputation through force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
When one hires a hitman to do harm to their neighbors, the hitman is not the only one who is acting in criminal behavior, but also the one who did the hiring. Ordering a thief to do the dirty work for you doesn't negate you from the deed itself. You are as equally guilty of criminal behavior if you do. Hiring a proxy to commit criminal acts does not absolve you of responsibility for those acts.
In shorter words, delegating violence doesn't erase accountability.
The central claim of this essay is that voting for a master to rule over others is itself a criminal act. This isn't because it is illegal, nor is it about voting being legal, but because casting a vote "authorizes"(empowers, appoints, or delegates) another person to commit acts that would be considered criminal if you carried them out yourself.
The Ballot as Delegation
If we could agree that hiring a hitman does not absolve the one who hired him from accountability, nor from ordering a thief to coming theft absolve the one who gave the order, then we must ask whether that same principle applies to political elections. What, after all, is a vote?
A vote is often described as "having a say" or "making your voice heard", but it is actually an attempt to select which individual or group of individuals will exercise coercive power over everyone else. The names, uniforms, and procedures may differ from location to location but the principles remain the same. The underlying question remains the same also, does casting a ballot change the moral nature of delegating coercion?
Let's consider what "governments" actually do. If private individuals use coercion as violence to tax, imprison, enforce regulations, wage war, confiscate property, etc. would the private individual be commiting acts of crime? Would you see them as criminals of they did? Is it a crime for private people to do what government does to the masses every single day?
If these acts would be crimes when committed privately, why would selecting the person who carries them out absolve the selector of moral responsibility?
"But I Didn't Vote For That" "That's not why I voted"
"I didn't vote for war. I didn't vote for taxation. I didn't vote for censorship or imprisonment. I voted because I liked the candidate's economic policy, or because I believed they would improve healthcare, education, or the country's infrastructure."
At first glance, this seems like a reasonable defense. After all, if your intentions were peaceful, how could you possibly be held morally responsible for everything a politician later does?
The problem, of course, with this objection is that it confuses motive with accountability.
Imagine hiring someone knowing that, as part of the job, they will periodically rob your neighbors. You may have hired them because they were an excellent accountant, mechanic, or builder, but if you knowingly empowered them despite their predictable acts of aggression, your accountability is not erased regardless of motivation.
Likewise, when someone votes for a political candidate, they are not only selecting a single policy in isolation, but selecting an office that comes with the power to tax, regulate, imprison, confiscate property, wage war, and enforce countless decrees through the threat or use of violence. Whether the voter personally approves of every one of those actions is beside the point. The office itself is inseparable from those powers.
Voting is therefore not merely an endorsement of preferred policies, but the selection of who will wield coercive power over everyone else. If you knowingly place someone into a position whose very function depends upon the use of coercion, can you completely separate yourself from the coercion that predictably follows?
Suppose I have no moral right to rule (authority) to therefore tax my neighbor, imprison him for refusing to pay me, regulate his peaceful behavior, or conscript him into war. If I possess none of those rights myself, by what process do I acquire the ability to delegate them to someone else?
Delegation transfers a power that already exists. It cannot magically create a moral right that never existed in the first place.
If I cannot rightfully appoint a hitman to murder my neighbor because I possess no such right myself, why should voting enable me to appoint a politician to perform acts I could never morally perform?
Where did the supposed moral right to delegate aggression come from in the first place?
The answer is that no such process exists. Voting cannot create a moral right that no individual possessed beforehand. If an act is wrong for one person to perform, placing that same act behind a ballot box or an elected office does not transform it into something morally permissible. Delegation cannot create what did not previously exist.
“Consent of the Governed”
Another common objection is the idea that political authority is legitimate because it rests on the “consent of the governed.”
At first glance, this sounds like a moral escape hatch. If people consent to being governed, then whatever follows from that governance is presumably justified. But this raises a more basic question. What does consent actually mean in this context?
Consent is not a symbolic gesture. It is not participation in a ritual, nor is it the mere existence of a voting mechanism. Consent, in any meaningful moral sense, requires a clear, informed, and voluntary agreement between identifiable parties, with the ability to refuse without coercion.
Now compare that standard to political systems.
Refusal to “consent” to being governed does not exempt any person from taxation, imprisonment, regulation, or violence enforced through law. The consequences of non-participation are not neutral. They are enforced regardless of individual approval.
If a relationship continues to impose consequences on a person regardless of their refusal, then calling that relationship “consensual” becomes a category error. It replaces actual consent with presumed consent. In short, if it is consensual, then it is voluntary, and if it must be governed(coerced with threats of violence) then it's not consensual.
Voting is often presented as evidence of consent. But participation in a system is not the same as agreeing to its terms. Being placed inside a structure and then given limited input into its operators is not equivalent to consenting to the structure itself.
By comparison, imagine being told you consent to a contract simply because you were given the ability to choose which manager enforces it, while never being allowed to opt out of the contract itself. In that case, selection is not consent, but a constrained participation inside an imposed framework.
Thus, “consent of the governed” does not at all function as consent in the moral sense being claimed. At best, it describes participation within an unavoidable system, that is not voluntary agreement in any fashion shape or form to its legitimacy. And if consent is not actually present in the relevant sense, then it cannot be used as a moral justification for coercion.
In shorter words, there is no such thing as "consent of the governed", because if you are governed then there is no consent.
If voting merely selected policies, this essay would fail. But voting selects rulers. Those rulers exercise powers that would be considered criminal if exercised by private individuals. Delegating those acts does not erase accountability, nor can voting create a moral right that no individual possessed beforehand.
Finally, appeals to the "consent of the governed" fail because genuine consent cannot exist where refusal is met with coercion. If these premises are true, then the conclusion follows naturally. Voting is not morally neutral. It is an act by which one attempts to empower another to rule over others through coercion.
Whether one accepts or rejects that conclusion is less important than whether one can identify where the reasoning itself fails. If the premises stand, then so too does the conclusion.
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Voting is violence. It is a claim the majority has the authority to rule the minority, which directly contradicts the fact that only individuals have any authority over themselves, and claims the authority individuals alone have been created to wield. Worse, only a minority ever wins elections, because only about half the population can actually vote. Children, the non compos mentus, the disenfranchised, and dissenters do not, or cannot, actually vote, so what democratic elections actually create is a tyranny of a minority of the population.
Democracies, just like Monarchies and other tyrannies, are crimes against humanity because they are governments that usurp the personal sovereignty inherent to individuals by virtue of the sole power they inalienably possess that is an aspect of their person. So, yes, voting is a crime because it is an effort to enslave free people that cannot be stripped of their sole authority to rule themselves.
Thanks!
“If voting merely selected policies, this essay would fail.”
—I am not sure that it would fail, even then. Even if it is only a policy, it still gets enforced on everyone, not only on the people who voted yes.
And, no one consented to the whole system within which this voting is taking place.
I think the essay—which is quite excellent!—succeeds. The only way that valid consent is satisfied is if
A) the individuals subject to the policy gave real, valid consent to participate in the polity enforcing the policy, or
B) the policy is only enforced upon those who voted for it.