You may elect whatever candidates you please to office, if you will allow me to select the candidates.
Women are citizens, children are citizens; but they do not exercise the elective franchise by virtue of their citizenship.
I'm not calling for a boycott on voting. But I think it should be very clear that just voting is not going to solve our problems.
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
Italians cannot vote on international treaties.
If you want something to actually happen, just voting isn't enough.
You can turn on Fox News almost any day and see some fictional story about voter fraud, the whole purpose of which is to limit voting by the poor, the elderly, college students and minorities.
As an organizer in the most underrepresented communities in my state, I have felt the frustration that so many voters must feel when other states limit polling locations, require photo IDs, and put unnecessary barriers in front of voters.
Democratic elections alone do not remedy the crisis of confidence in government. Moreover, there is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting.
On Election Day, Ralph Nader will appear on the presidential ballot in only 45 states. Yeah, Nader said, this is really disappointing, I wanted to embarrass myself in all 50 states. That was the plan.
Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our problems. In the end, that's just a silly, infantile notion.
In this country, you don't have any democracy really. You have the right to elect but not to select. For example, here's two people: you get to vote for one of them. But you didn't choose in the first place either of them. That's not democracy…
We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.
Luckily, voting machines register only 'yes' or 'no,' not 'yes, but I hate myself'.
