It seems all we hear during the fall season of an election year is how important it is to vote. People who claim voting is our civic duty clearly don’t understand what civic duty is. We are by no means required to choose between two candidates when neither brings anything of value to the table (I realize there are third-party candidates, but the way the U.S. electoral system is set up, no third party candidate will ever be elected, so casting a vote for them has no effect on the outcome.) Nothing makes me more angered than hearing people talk about how important it is to vote and that your vote really does matter.

The truth is your vote doesn’t matter and it never will. How many elections in the United States (at the national or state level) have been decided by one vote? Let me just give you the answer, it’s zero. This is amplified by the Electoral College system, because even if a national election is decided by one state’s Electoral College votes, it still doesn’t mean that your vote mattered. For your vote to matter the state that cast the deciding electoral votes would have to have their elections within that state decided by one vote. This means in approximately 240 years, no single person’s vote has ever mattered for a presidential election. Yes, you can make the argument that if we followed this logic then no one would vote (in reality, not voting is the only logical option). Regardless, that doesn’t change the fact that, as it currently is in America, your vote counts for exactly zero. The outcome of the election will be the same whether you decide to vote early, vote on Election Day, or stay home and play video games, and anyone who tells you differently is naive.

Another argument people make is that the act of voting matters, even if your individual vote didn’t change the outcome of the election. This is false; doing something for the sake of doing it is not in any way commendable or valuable. If this were true then the act of voting would have to have some sort of inherent value, which it doesn’t. The value of voting is based off of the fact that you can make a difference in the outcome, which as I stated before, has never been true thus far in American history.

Another argument that people make is to reference the fact that people in the armed forces have died to preserve our right to vote. People have served our country to preserve our right to make a rational decision, not to be pressured to make a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Making a choice to not vote is just as valid as making a decision to vote for one of the above candidates. Instead of caving to the pressure to vote for “the lesser of two evils,” why don’t we instead stand up and be proud of not voting? Why not make the two parties put someone of value forth, to earn our vote, instead of just having them compete to be less worthless than the other? We should no longer be ashamed of our choice not to vote, and we are not lesser citizens because we refuse to cave in to advertising and celebrity endorsements. So, come Nov. 6, I will stay home and be satisfied in knowing that the election is going to have the exact same outcome as if I had voted.