Reviews

Dissenting Electorate: Those Who Refuse to Vote and the Legitimacy of Their Opposition by Robert J. Ringer, Gregory Bresiger, Adin Ballou, Francis Tandy, Robert Weissberg, Frank Chodorov, Alan Koontz, Sy Leon, Wendy McElroy, Richard Grant, Lysander Spooner, Hans Sherrer, A. John Simmons, Carl Watner, George Smith, Benjamin Ginsberg, John Pugsley, Robert LeFevre, Herbert Spencer

jessrock's review

4.0

A friend recommended this awhile ago, and I found it at the DePaul library (it's not the easiest book to find, although Amazon seems to have it in stock every once in a while). It's a collection of essays dating from 1845 to the present, all written about nonvoting (the subtitle is "those who refuse to vote and the legitimacy of their opposition"). Some of the essays are better than others, but overall it's excellent food for thought. The general theme is that voting is a means of perpetuating an unjust system wherein a small group of people impose their wills on the masses & that this is a form of violence. It's basically written by and for people with a libertarian/anarchist mindset - several of the essays are specifically directed toward libertarians who don't see a contradiction in the idea of a Libertarian Party - but it was very interesting to read & think about these issues and ideas.