I’m Voting for Someone Else (and So Should You)

My vote doesn’t matter to me. It never has. It doesn’t make much difference to me whether Clinton or Trump becomes president.

So I’m voting for someone else.

I have participated in four presidential elections now and the outcome of each — regardless of who won — had little impact on me. Good or bad.

I wasn’t sent over to Iraq, and I certainly wasn’t one of the thousands of Americans who died in that meaningless war. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who died for no reason at all.

I wasn’t one of the millions of Americans who lost their homes during the housing crisis. I didn’t own a home. And I didn’t benefit from the economic recovery that followed because it hadn’t really affected me to begin with.

I’m not gay so gay marriage and the ongoing battle for LGBTQ rights has had little influence over my life.

Banning Muslims and deporting millions of immigrants or building an absurd wall across the US-Mexico border will have no impact on me because I am not Muslim and I am not an immigrant nor a refugee.

I am not a woman so whether or not they get 70 cents on the dollar or not doesn’t matter to me. And I will never get pregnant so I will never have to make the decision to terminate it.

If Obamacare gets dismantled, I’ll be fine. I’m fortunate enough to have no medical conditions (yet) and my spouse has insurance through her workplace.

And I will be long dead before the effects of climate change become large enough to be noticeable in my cozy corner of the world, far from any coastline.

Like my vote, all of these issues don’t matter to me. I’m a white male living in the wealthiest nation on the planet. Long before I was even born decisions were made, chromosomes were arranged, and votes were cast in a way that put me in a position where I didn’t have to worry that I or my family might be deported, that I might be paid less for equal work, or that I might be killed just for being who I am.

Most of all, I didn’t have to worry about voting.

In fact, voting in my own best interest is mostly redundant now.

I could just as easily not vote or — god forbid — vote third party without as much as a single aspect of my life changing.

So if you’re like me and voting doesn’t matter to you anymore, don’t waste your vote.

Vote for someone else.

For millions of people voting has the unfortunate burden of having real and direct consequences on their lives. By giving them your vote, you can make it so their vote doesn’t matter quite so much.

Now you can’t just give a person your vote. That’s probably illegal. But there’s a loophole that your ancestors have benefited from for centuries now. You can vote with someone else’s best interest in mind. Vote for someone you don’t even know, someone you might not even like, someone who might not even be born yet, but for whom this election will have an actual impact.

And maybe someday everyone will have the rare privilege of voting for someone else.