A Duty Not to Vote?

I am not going to address the circumstances under which one ought not to vote because the election is corrupted: there is only one candidate, the count will be manipulated, to show up at the polling place would be to risk life and limb, or the election will have some other fundamental defect. These require fact intensive case by case analysis. What I am going to consider is a toy case in which it would be wrong to cast a vote because doing so would conflict with values underlying democratic processes. Then I will touch on some alternative voting procedures and finally will consider on whether toy case would generalize to a typical government election.

Lottery Democracy

Adding a little randomness to democracy is sometimes to the good. Why, when, and how far?

The Moral Underpinnings of Democracy and its Degree-Affected Variant

Motivated by some ideas that percolated around in the New Left, this essay argues that the core justification of democracy is not that it maximizes utility (which it often does pretty well) or even that it recognizes equality of citizenship (which is essential to any just political order), but instead that it is the best projection into the sphere of social decision making of the values of individual autonomy and liberty. It follows that democracy keyed to the stake that each voter has in the outcome will sometimes realize democratic values more fully than does one citizen one vote.