Photo: Derek van Vliet

It wasn’t long ago that I used to believe that voter participation is a sign of a healthy democracy. I was of the mind that a person who doesn’t vote is taking for granted his or her hard-won democratic rights to exercise control over their own destiny. To repeat the oft-used phrase, “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain later.”

I’m no longer convinced that’s a true statement.

I voted in the 2008 election for the federal Conservative Party, and I’ve had plenty to complain about afterward. The argument that my vote allows me to complain about the party I voted for isn’t exactly logical. One might as well make the same logical argument that by voting for Stephen Harper, I had a direct hand in enabling some of the disastrous work he and his party have done in the two years succeeding that date.

I don’t intend to vote in the next election, whenever that may be, and I don’t believe I’m obligated to do so either. Nor do I feel that it invalidates my role as a political commentator, pundit, writer, blogger, or whatever other title one would like to bestow on me. Although I am fully aware there are those who don’t agree with that viewpoint.

Voting, one might argue, is a means of engaging myself in the democratic process. But is it a means to an ends? Not really. Your vote is relatively insignificant individually, particularly in ridings where the incumbent wins with over 60% of the popular vote. And though that isn’t always true — Vancouver South for instance — it is true in most cases.

As a resident of Vancouver-Kingsway, where the Conservative candidate is an incumbent third place finisher to the NDP and Liberals, it might be considered pointless to cast a vote in the First-Past-The-Post charade we call a democracy. Tyranny of the majority means that urban conservatives are usually drowned out by the orange and red parties. The same can be said for the rural Liberal living in Alberta.

But aside from the relative assessment of the value of the vote, who is to say that anonymous participation in elections is the only meaningful way of influencing political change?

I agree that voting has meaning in a democracy. But I disagree that not voting is the polarity of this statement. Refusing to vote is also an exercise in democratic participation. And I don’t mean that in the kind of non-participation of those people who can’t be bothered to vote because they don’t know what the issues are, who the candidates are, or a preference to watch Glee instead. I mean it in the context of a person making a principled refusal to involve themselves in a process they consider to be a charade.

A man voting in every election in which his vote ultimately doesn’t count is not engaged in the democratic process. He is, in fact, experiencing the opposite of the intended purpose of polling an electorate. It isn’t his opinions that matter, but the collective opinions of those who prevail in greater numbers every four years for the rest of his life. This is a man who is disenfranchised from democracy, even if he has technically participated in the futile endeavor.

Worse yet, some would argue that voting is a “civic duty”, not unlike jury service or filling out the census. But this is nothing more than a social construct; meaningless without binding laws that require a person to participate. And yet, paradoxically, forcing someone to participate makes the act equally meaningless [as it does for the census].

As an individual of free will and the full rights of citizenship, it is my birthright to refuse to vote if presented with a choice between the “left” and the “farther left”. Imposing one’s own prerogative upon others isn’t reinforcing democracy either. It’s reinforcing tyranny. The greater the choice, the freer the people. It is, after all, a basic conservative tenet.

So why not spoil my ballot? Why not make the formality of walking into the voting office, presenting my photographic identification and proof of address, and write a big X through every choice?

Because that wouldn’t serve any purpose either. There is no inherent difference between having Elections Canada note the statistical number of spoiled ballots to the percentage of registered voters who didn’t bother to show up. And with a voter turnout that is dangerously close to half the legal registered voters in this country, the message has already been heard loud and clear.

I exercised my democratic choice in 2008 by voting for the Conservative Party because they promised not to run deficits ever again. And let me be clear [as Stephen Harper would like to say]: the Conservative Party didn’t say they might not run deficits again, or that they would prefer not to run deficits again, or that they were 90% sure they would not run deficits again.

No, they explicitly denied any possibility of running deficits in Canada so long as they were granted power again. And whether you cite the fact that they were a minority government, or under tough “economic circumstances”, or that they could not predict the full extent of the economic collapse, the fact remains that they broke their promise.

If and when I feel that my democracy is worthy of participation in again, I will exercise that right. It’s a right I never lost, and it never went away.

In the meantime, I’ll be continuing to exercise another right that can have political influence: freedom of speech.