So there's something I want to say re: intentionally withholding your vote, and I want to do it without coming across as condescending or dismissive.
I've worked as a field organizer in two campaigns, 2010 and 2012, and my job was to help turnout the vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket. Technology may have changed, but people are still knocking on doors for specific voters the way they were 12 years ago.
If you say you're not voting/voting 3rd party, the campaign volunteer is supposed to mark that and move on. Their job, in the final month of the election, is to make sure the campaign's supporters have all the information and resources they need to cast a vote.
They aren't collecting data on why you're withholding your vote. They aren't submitting opinion polling results to the campaign. Something like 155 million people voted in the 2020 election, and if you say you're not voting, the campaign is not going to waste a volunteer's time and morale begging you to vote when there are literally millions of other voters to turn out.
Let me repeat that: The campaign does not track why you're not voting. They simply note your vote is not a priority for turnout and move on.
I say this because I see a lot of promotion of non-voting like that's a boycott, when the function is not the same. A boycott is a coordinated mass refusal to engage with an institutionβwhich sounds similar if you see a vote as a good or service to withhold. Unfortunately, it's not.
A vote is a choice you're making as part of a community hiring committee. Your abstention doesn't prevent someone from being hired. It just lowers the threshold for the worst candidate to succeed.
All this to say: In my direct experience as an organizer, abstaining from the vote sends a message. That message is not "You need to try harder to win my vote." It's "Don't waste time on me."
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