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How Do You Vote Under a Failed Electoral System? [1]

['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder']

Date: 2023-12-06

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.

In just over one year, we will be entering a new presidential term very likely led by current president Joe Biden or former president Donald Trump, lest death or surprise alternative candidates materialize.

For some people (especially young and first-time voters) these choices seem bleak, and I’ve heard stirrings that some might abstain from voting altogether. This isn’t surprising: America’s voter turnout is usually low, with the past three big election cycles (2018, 2020, and 2022) garnering 49%, 66%, and 46% voter turnout respectively, according to Pew Research data. This is definitely the case in rural America where voter turnout is lower than urban areas for reasons from the lack of convenient voting infrastructure to more animosity toward the government.

This last point I want to hone in on, because I’ve been chewing on a version of it myself for the past several months now.

Anarchism is an anti-state political philosophy with a vision for a world without government. The philosophy has long been present in rural communities and is perhaps exemplified best by the late folk singer and labor organizer Utah Phillips who lived by the motto that his body was a ballot:

“‘Cast that body ballot on behalf of the people around you every day of your life, every day. And don’t let anybody ever tell you you haven’t voted,’” Phillips told fellow Nevada City, California resident and writer Carolyn Crane in an article for The Nation of the motto he was once told by a another anarchist.

This 2004 conversation marked the first time Phillips would vote, because in the wake of former president George W. Bush’s first term, amid the Iraq War, he thought the state of the world had become too bleak not to vote.

“What’s the best chance they’ve got to keep them from being bombed and killed? I don’t know. [2004 presidential candidate John] Kerry is an unknown quantity. Bush is a known quantity. A crapshoot, isn’t it? But I’m going to stand in for one of these people. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong by myself,” Phillips said.

We’re facing a similar crisis now amid the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, with the real possibility of another Trump presidency. A great package of forthcoming articles from The Atlantic articulates what could happen if Trump is reelected thanks to the conservative Supreme Court he successfully nominated in his first term. He’s threatened, time again, that he will not appoint any White House aides and cabinet officials who might restrain him as they did his first term. Legal experts fear his stolen-election fervor, his hate toward anyone outside his far-right bubble, will create a much more radical, and more effective, presidency than his first.

I know a lot of people who are angry at President Biden for a lot of reasons – his “bear-hug” of support for Israel, the erosion of abortion rights thanks to the dissolution of Roe v. Wade, and the inability to make good on a promise to cancel student loan debt, to name just a few. The direct responsibility he holds in the outcome of these issues varies, with the conservative Supreme Court and tumultuous Congress less than helpful to his efforts.

Voters are understandably disappointed to have just two viable presidential choices, or in some places only one if the community you live in is dominated by a political party, like in many rural areas.

This limited choice is because in almost every state, whichever candidate wins the popular vote is given every single electoral vote assigned to the state, a number determined by the state’s population. If you vote against the popular candidate in your community, your vote is not counted toward the total number of votes a certain candidate gets from the states. This is the difference between the electoral college – the system the United States currently votes under – and a direct popular vote. It’s what people reference when they say Hillary Clinton got more popular votes but less electoral votes against Trump during the 2016 election. In this country, you don’t have to be popular to win.

The electoral college has restricted voter options so much that you can’t be an issue voter, as many young people are showing a tendency to be, only a party voter. The push to “vote blue no matter who,” for example, can be an unbearably restrictive plea that leaves people feeling like there’s no way to influence the issues they care about if their candidate is not part of the Republican or Democratic parties. As rural sociologist Loka Ashwood put it in a Daily Yonder interview, “parties mediate the power of any one vote through a web of bureaucracy that constrains the direct action important to the people who go to the polls.”

So what option is there? Does choosing a president always have to be a choice between the “lesser of two evils,” which is itself a flawed framework? Unless a viable third candidate arises in the next year, or a movement is able to effectively reign the strategic power of withholding a vote (perhaps dubious, but an anarchist’s favorite move), I don’t know what other option there is. Utah Phillips’ choice to vote for either Kerry or Bush feels similar to the decision we’ll make next year, but unlike in 2004, at least both Biden and Trump are known quantities. We have seen, and can predict with more certainty, what each of their presidencies would bring. Is there one that might do less harm?

The only way this cost-benefit analysis is palatable to me is if I look beyond next year’s election. Much of the pessimism about the state of our country and our world comes out of a failure to imagine what could be different.

The electoral college has failed us spectacularly and it will take an unbelievable amount of work to change the way our votes count. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try: Progress is and always will be an ongoing process.

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