Speed Running Voting in the 2024 Election

I’ve voted in every election since Bush v Gore, and without exception I’ve heard people talk about how not voting is more ethical, better activism, or completely moot because it doesn’t matter. I’m so weary of it, so let’s speed run this sh!t.

“My Vote Doesn’t Count”

People who press us to get out and vote are rarely the ones we view as oppressive. Cops aren’t knocking on doors to get people voting. The IRS doesn’t whip the vote. Collections corporations don’t want their customers targets voting. The executives and board members of our employers generally don’t give us the day off and encourage us to vote. Political parties and their online cheerleaders don’t want us to vote unless we’re already obviously in their camp.

The system does everything it can to stop us from voting and to stop our vote from counting equally with every other citizen’s. They try to eliminate vote by mail and stop online voting by any means necessary. They target specific groups based on correlations with those groups tending to vote for their opponents and gerrymander their districts to dilute their power. They transparently introduce new speed bumps and hurdles for us to jump over to get to the polls. The parties run their primaries in ways that let them ignore what the voters want and nominate who they were going to pick anyway. We don’t even get election day off as a federal holiday.

In the case of the incarcerated, lawmakers strip us of our voting rights and then the prison industrial complex ships prisoners wherever they like so they can do so without immediately turning that state purple or blue. Even upon release, felons (~4.4 million people) don’t get their rights back to try and reform the system that punished them.

If our votes didn’t matter, why would they even need to buy out all our media and spread propaganda constantly? Why gerrymander? Why try so hard to intimidate voters with shows of force at the polls? Why introduce voter ID laws that disproportionately affect the elderly, the working poor, and minorities?

The system, industry, and the parties most aligned against our interests love it when we don’t vote.

If for no other reason, I vote to negate the vote of some other asshole out there.

“Voting is Unethical”

The idea that our vote makes us complicit in the actions of the government we’re assigned is absurd. Our governments take what they want from us constantly. Through taxes, through labor, and if we don’t comply they throw us in prison and force us to work anyway. And we have a higher percentage of people in prison than any other country our size.

People who’re used for their labor at threat of violence aren’t complicit. Their choices in the matter are illusional. This will be true even if we dismantled all the barriers to a truly democratic system and broke up the consolidated media ownership propaganda machine. No one who has to work to survive can justly be called complicit in that system. No matter how indoctrinated they may currently be.

The state’s ideal situation is for us to labor for free, give them all our money, and not vote. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking giving them a free victory is resistance.

“It’s Actually Better Activism to Not Vote”

This is the one I hear in my tighter political circles more and more since Biden got the nomination in 2020. It’s amped up even more since he earned the apt title Genocide Joe. I’ve struggled to understand the point of telling people we agree with not to vote. Usually the way I hear it sold is “Instead of voting, we should:

• Read books by anti-capitalist, anarchist, abolitionist, minority thinkers.
• Show up to protests, picket lines, mutual aid events, and community meetings.
• Disrupt the system from the ways it oppresses people however we can.”

But…

It’s not a this-or-that situation. We should diversify our work across as many fronts as we can, especially when one of those channels asks so little of our effort.

And it’s so easy* to vote. It’s not like we can’t spend the other 364 days of our year doing those things. _{* for most people who are able to vote by mail or have fair access to polling places.}

How much work is voting really?

It’s one day every two years for the big ones, and perhaps a primary or special election on occasion in between. It doesn’t even use the whole day for most people.

I’ve been voting by mail for over a decade, and while it takes a long time to do all the research before I make my choices, the actual act of voting is like 15 minutes.

I do the research compulsively anyway. So do all the other terminally online doomscrolling political gossipmongers who’re talking about the election right now. They’re already doing their own — inefficient and mentally unhealthy — form of research anyway. Anyone reading this is probably already hundreds of hours into following this election. Filling in a few circles and dropping an envelope into a mailbox is so simple after that, even for my lazy ass. We don’t even need a stamp.

And for those who don’t engage with politics at all until November, they can generally find a voting guide by someone they know (like me) and use that as a starting point to figure out their choices. There is no shortage of opinions out here.

Speed Running My Vote

So this year I plan to demonstrate this by speed running my vote. Once I get my mail-in ballot, I’ll figure out a way to video myself filling out my ballot, sealing it, dropping it in my mailbox, and slapping my I Voted sticker on all in one take.

Let’s see how fast I can do it, and then we can talk about how much of an inconvenience people are spending so much time and energy attempting to justify avoiding.

How It’ll Work

As usual, I’ll do my research and make my recommendations long before the election. I’ll share those shortly after I receive my sample ballot, which should be weeks before the real ballots get mailed out. Leading up to when the official ballots arrive, I’ll continue to discuss, research, and solidify my choices.

When my ballot arrives, I’ll grab my black pen, set up my camera, hit record, and go! I’ll fill in all my choices, sign it, seal my envelope, and run down to my closest outgoing mailbox to drop it in.

Fun Fact: In California, we can use a stub of our ballot to track our ballot, hear when it’s counted, and even make sure it’s counted accurately!

I’ll try to upload my video as raw and as quickly as possible to my YouTube channel and social media feeds. Then we’ll see how long it took and see if anyone else can beat my score.

Update: Here’s the Video!

Read about it here.

What do you think?

How long do you think it’ll take me to go from my first pen mark to dropping it in the mailbox?

If you think this sounds fun, make your own speed run video and share it with me! Or just time yourself and we can use the honor system to see who can vote fastest!