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Aaron and Trevor debate Jim Harper and Michael F. Cannon on the merits of voting on this special Election Day bonus episode of Free Thoughts.
The bleak prospect of living in a country governed by one of the major-party presidential candidates seems to bolster arguments against voting. Declining to participate in this year’s deeply unsatisfactory election may signal a preference for “none of the above” while denying personal sanction to the many wrongs and injustices governments mete out in our names. Not voting is a time-saver, too.
But non-participation in the vote may be an unwise option. Voting doesn’t just elect a candidate: it may signal to a variety of important audiences what direction the electorate would like the country to take. Perhaps voting is the best option available, even if other candidates and other systems of government would provide more liberty and prosperity. Failing to vote may waste personal power.
Is the best choice to vote one’s conscience, vote strategically, or not vote at all?
Jason Kuznicki is editor in chief at Liberalism.org. Previously, he was a senior fellow and the editor of Cato Books and of Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute’s online journal of debate. His first book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For? (Palgrave, 2017) surveys Western political theory from a libertarian perspective.
Jim Harper is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on privacy issues and select legal and constitutional law issues. He is the coeditor of Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It (2010) and the author of Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood (2006). He has written several amicus briefs in Fourth Amendment cases before the US Supreme Court and has published scholarly articles in a variety of law journals. In the popular press, Mr. Harper has been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications.
Michael F. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies. Previously, he served as a domestic policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, where he advised the Senate leadership on health, education, labor, welfare, and the Second Amendment. He holds a bachelor’s degree in American government (B.A.) from the University of Virginia, and master’s degrees in economics (M.A.) and law & economics (J.M.) from George Mason University.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.