Voting is not violence

A serious faction of libertarians holds that casting a ballot is itself an act of violence. The claim is not that some statutes are violent. That part is obvious, and it is the reason this coalition exists. The claim is that the person who marks a name becomes a party to the force the state will later use, and that the only clean position is to stay home.

The claim deserves a straight answer. It is not a slogan to be waved off, and it is not a reason to pretend that elections are a marketplace of voluntary contracts. They are not. What follows is the coalition's answer: voting is not violence, abstention does not repeal a statute, and a ballot aimed at the worst penalties on peaceful people is harm reduction inside a system you did not build and cannot, by refusing a form, dissolve.

What the objection actually says

The careful version of the objection, running from Lysander Spooner through a century of anti-political writing, is roughly this. The state enforces its decisions with fines, seizure, and cages. An election chooses the people who will decide what those instruments are used for. To vote is to help appoint the agent of that force. You would not hire a thief and then deny responsibility for the theft. Why, the argument asks, is a legislature different?

A louder version drops the analogy and keeps the word. Voting is violence because politics is violence, full stop. On this telling, a strategic vote is worse than a quiet one, because it dresses complicity up as prudence.

Both versions treat a ballot as if it were the blow. That is the step that does not hold.

A ballot does not strike anyone

Violence, if the word is going to mean anything in a legal argument, is the intentional use of force against a person or their property. A vote is a recorded preference among candidates for an office that will exist tomorrow whether or not you hold a pen. It does not seize a car, it does not set a sentence, and it does not put a hand on anyone. The deputy who serves a forfeiture, the clerk who will not issue a license, the judge who signs the order: those are the acts that land. Conflating them with the ballot makes the word "violence" so wide that it also covers a juror who votes to acquit, a lawyer who files a brief, and a neighbor who calls a prosecutor and asks that a case be dropped. If everything upstream of force is force, the word no longer picks out what we are trying to stop.

There is a real moral remainder, and it should be conceded. If you vote for a candidate in order that peaceful people be punished, you share the aim of the punishment. Intention matters. A person who supports a forfeiture bill because he wants his rivals ruined is not saved by the fact that he used a ballot box rather than a brick. The coalition's scoring rule is built to face that remainder rather than to hide it. We rank the punishment of nonviolent people as the harm, and we treat a candidate who would widen that punishment as a cost, not as a neutral.

Sharing an aim is not the same thing as striking the blow, and opposing an aim is not the same thing as joining it. The objection erases that difference. It says that any contact with the instrument is guilt for whatever the instrument later does, including the things you voted to stop. That is collective guilt, not agency. You are not the author of statutes passed before you were born. You are the author of what you do with the influence you actually have.

Abstention is not a repeal

The practical defect of the objection is larger than the conceptual one. Refusing the ballot does not return power to voluntary society. It assigns your share of a decision that will be made anyway to the people who still show up. In a close race for an office that writes penalties, the marginal non-voter does not create a zone of liberty. He increases the relative weight of voters who want the penalty.

This is not a claim that every race is close. Most are not, and the scorecard says so. Winnability is a separate dimension precisely because a ballot cast in a seat that cannot change hands is worth less than a ballot cast where it can. When the weight falls far enough, the honest call is a toss-up, and the right residual moves are economic and legal, described in the companion essay. What we will not say is that staying home is a strike against the statute. The statute cannot read your protest. It can only be amended, repealed, narrowed, interpreted, or enforced less often, by people who hold offices.

Someone who will not vote, on principle, can still do those other things. Nothing here condemns a principled abstention. It condemns the description of other people's harm-reducing votes as violence, and the comfort of believing that a clean conscience and a worse statute are the same achievement.

Participation is not canonization

A second form of the objection says that a vote endorses the candidate's whole record. You cannot, on this view, support someone for repealing a forfeiture law without becoming responsible for that person's worst unrelated position.

Ranking is not canonization. An endorsement on this site names the office, the issues that drove the score, and the gap that made the call clear or not. It is a comparison between the choices on that ballot, not a certificate of character and not a prediction that the winner will behave. Candidates on this version of the site are placeholders. The rule will be the same when the names are real. We will publish the issues, the alignments, and the reasoning. A reader who thinks we have weighted the wrong harm can argue with the formula, which is public, instead of with a vibe.

The alternative standard — vote for no one who holds any position you reject — is a standard that almost never produces a vote. That may be the point. It is not a standard for reducing the number of peaceful people in cages.

The jury, the lawyer, and the vote

We already understand this distinction in rooms that are closer to the force. A defense lawyer who walks into a criminal court is not "doing violence" because the court can imprison. A juror who holds out for acquittal on a nonviolent possession charge is using a coercive institution to stop a coercion. They would not be more innocent if they refused the summons and let a unanimous conviction come back in an hour. They would be less involved, which is not the same virtue.

Voting is weaker and blunter than a jury vote. It is also the instrument that decides who appoints the prosecutors and who writes the possession statute the juror is later stuck applying. Treating the blunter instrument as uniquely sinful, while treating the lawyer and the juror as honorable, is a mood about politics, not a theory of force.

What we are willing to say

The coalition's claim is narrow, and it should stay narrow.

We do not say that the state is a voluntary association. It is not. We do not say that a vote authorizes every act of the winner. It does not. We do not say that an appearance at the polls discharges a person's duties to their neighbors. It does not. We say that a ballot is a piece of influence over offices that will use force regardless, that the force is not equally distributed across the legal code, and that aiming the influence at the worst penalties on peaceful, nonviolent people is a responsible use of it.

If that is complicity, it is the complicity of pulling on the brake of a machine someone else built. Call the machine violent. The word still fits the statute, the raid, and the sentence. It does not fit the hand on the brake.