“In our democracy, the ballot box is where you get to act as jury. Campaign contributions is where you get to be the judge. You can convict any incumbent politician of misusing public trust and yielding to monied special interests by withholding your money and voting the individual out of office.”

Is this statement palpably true? Let's see. What's presupposed here is that (1) we are, in fact, in a democracy, (2) can by voting make a judgment about guilt and innocence as to misuse of public monies and, (3) can actually and meaningfully change the moral environment by expelling an adjudged miscreant. While it may be true that one can make a judgment about guilt or innocence by voting (#2 above), because special interest contributors own both incumbent and non-incumbent candidates, we have neither a democracy (#1 above) nor a capacity meaningfully to punish an adjudged miscreant and cleanse public service (#3 above). Its not so much whether one decides “whether or how to vote” but rather whether voting carries any import at all.

Voting in the United States today is little different than voting in Bulgaria cerca 1952. If you know going in that AIPAC, for example, has privately coerced the candidates of both parties into agreeing that a pre-emptive military strike on Iran is the good policy, that banking interests will contribute only to candidates favoring more stringent debt collection laws and that the candidates themselves eagerly accept these strictures, voting on such questions is, at best, somnambulistic. Yet these are our realities. Yesterday's vote on the UN's Goldstone report is a case in point. The vote not to support the Goldstone conclusions, 344 to 36. Ask yourself if a vote like that was arrived at without coercion. Josef Stalin in his finest moments couldn't have done much better. In such circumstances is one really free to cast a vote that hasn't already been stolen. I don't think so. Non-participation, then, is simply a kind of grudging acceptance, the very form of powerlessness.