Why I’m Selling My Absentee Ballot and You Should Too

It’s midterm season! And not the boring academic dishonesty kind, but rather the political kind! While this can be a very tense and stressful period, it really doesn’t have to be—you just need to know how to do your part. In this election cycle, you should be able to sell your vote for top dollar and rest easy knowing you did the right thing. 

Now I fully understand that voting is a hard won civic duty. A lot of folks worked tirelessly to make sure everyone some people are able to vote, and many feel you should honor that commitment by exercising your right. What’s also true, though, is that many people worked even harder to make sure you can’t vote, and it’s okay to honor their commitment too. 

The thing is, there aren’t any good arguments for voting in the first place. The odds of you affecting the outcome of an election are just so low. Like one in a million, or one in ten thousand for a local election. And even if it’s somehow a close race, the margin of error from recounts is far greater than one measly vote. You could be tutoring children, feeding zoo animals or raising money for cancer research, but by voting you are instead just wasting your time and putting undue strain on society’s transport systems.

But you already knew that. Deep down, everybody knows voting is completely ineffectual. People literally only do it because they feel guilty if they don’t. Society shames them if they don’t partake in an activity even more performative than sharing infographics on Instagram or volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. Selling your vote and donating the profits is the only way to make sure your vote actually matters. Rise above your primitive desire for belonging and start selling—that’s what you’d do if you actually cared.

Besides, even if you wanted to pretend that the world is affected by whether you choose candidates based on their Wikipedia pages or just christmas tree your ballot, it still wouldn’t be a good idea to vote. We common folk really don’t know much about what people do in office. That stuff is like really complicated and top secret a lot of the time. The people buying your ballot, however, will be the very rich and powerful. They know the most and would truly lose the most if the country fell apart, so they’re our best bet at not letting that happen.

And if you’re still not convinced, please at least realize that selling your vote could really do a lot to unite the country, and we could use a win right now. My uncle sends me four Facebook messages per day complaining about election fraud. If we all just sell our ballots we can ensure there is actually massive fraud, that way we’re all back on the same page.

In many ways this country resembles that uncle. Helpless and broken. Just so many crippling ailments that we’re sitting near lifelessly in a hospital bed. Sure we could maybe keep things going for a couple more miserable years at the cost of a crippling financial burden to all of us, but for what? Instead of trying to correct an already sunken ship by voting, let’s just use the ballot sale money to buy some cheap liquor so we can kick back and fucking party while we wait for whatever follows America in the ever-barreling pages of history.