John Ketchum, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote an op-ed for the New York Post warning that you "can’t complain about Mamdani as mayor" if you don't vote.
This is a common admonition repeated often by both the left and right around election time. We will no doubt hear someone else singing the same refrain before the November election.
The New York City mayoral election is especially susceptible to this warning about being silenced for not voting because a radical extremist is running. Zohran Mamdani is projected to win the race for mayor easily, causing much unease among anyone with an IQ over 50. Mamdani's grandiose socialist agenda of freebies and "get out of jail free cards" for criminals is sure to fail spectacularly, leaving New York City, at the very least, a lot worse off than it is today.
But what if the alternative is equally bad?
Andrew Cuomo isn't a socialist. In some ways, he's worse. He's a corrupt insider who, as governor, sentenced old people to death during the pandemic. To prevent people with COVID-19 from suffering the "stigma" of the disease, he allowed infected patients to convalesce in nursing homes.
The result was catastrophic. In 2021, Cuomo's administration announced that 6,000 senior citizens died in nursing homes. The actual number was closer to 15,000. An investigation by Congress revealed that "the discrepancy in the numbers stemmed from the Cuomo administration's decision to only count deaths that occurred inside the nursing homes."
The other alternative in the New York City mayoral contest is Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who has admitted to faking crimes to drum up publicity for the Guardian Angels in the 1990s.. He has also admitted to staging subway crimes and had Guardian Angels members paint "KKK" and "White Power" graffiti on their own headquarters.
New Yorkers should pass on Sliwa.
Mamdani has an army of thousands eagerly knocking on doors to spread his gospel of goodies for all, as well as most mainstream Democratic politicians in the state — including Gov. Kathy Hochul — are now backing his candidacy with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Those mainstream Democrats were shamed into supporting Mamdani by the radical left wokesters who are now firmly in the Democratic Party driver's seat.
Given all the choices open to New York City voters, the only rational option is not voting.
In 2024, George Will wrote a defense of not voting in his syndicated column.
This year, many millions of voters so intensely dislike one or the other of the two major candidates, fury will propel them to the polls. But suppose bipartisan disappointment propelled millions to boycott the election? Imagine a dramatic upsurge in nonvoting that was explainable as a principled protest.
This could not be measured in exit polls because nonvoters do not enter the polls. But talented psephologists should be able to find a way to measure, from the mass of eligible voters, the size of a cohort that abstained because of thoughtful disgust.
There has been some discussion about making voting mandatory, as in the old Soviet Union and today in North Korea. Forced electoral participation is inimical to a free society. Indeed, it wasn't until the late 19th century, when progressives advocated for it, that it became an issue.
The highest voter turnout in history was in 2020, when more than 66% of eligible voters turned out. That election gave us Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress that spent $5.5 trillion to "recover" from the pandemic. Instead, massive amounts of cash were shoveled toward the teachers, organized labor, and favored NGOs. It set off an inflationary spiral we're still trying to shake today.
It might be a constructive signal to both parties if, for the first time in a century, more than half the electorate would not vote. (Only 48.9 percent voted in 1924.) Voters’ eloquent abstention would say that they will return to the political marketplace when offered something better than a choice between two Edsels.
Not voting is a principled statement of opposition to the status quo. It's an idiotic notion that the First Amendment should be virtually repealed for non-voters, preventing them from complaining about a politician who ended up being elected.
Non-voters make as powerful a statement as anyone who casts a ballot.
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