Voting, Mandates, and "Windows Into the Soul"

A vote is not a window into the soul, but neither is the candidate receiving the vote bound to view it in the context it is offered.

A vote is not a window into the soul, but neither is the candidate receiving the vote bound to view it in the context it is offered.

There is a fine line between not judging the ways that people exercise their conscience at the ballot box on the one hand and, on the other, recognizing and wrestling with the real consequences of a candidate getting enough votes to win and how they will view the mandate they feel they have been given.

We should not judge 2020 Trump voters, for example, for what happened on Jan. 6. No one that previous November was voting for an assault on the Capitol. Similarly, it is unlikely that more than a certain segment of Biden voters in 2020 wanted the kind of progressive governance he ended up pursuing.

But Donald Trump said many times that the 70+ million votes he received justified his efforts to challenge the election results and it was his unhinged belief that he had won the election that led to what happened on Jan. 6. And while Joe Biden's true 2020 mandate (that he wasn't Donald Trump) was fulfilled the minute he was sworn into office, he took his victory as a signal to embark upon what he and others have characterized as the most progressive agenda ever pursued.

This is what I mean when I assert that negative partisanship frustrates the essence of democracy. This is what I mean when I assert that voting for lesser evils corrupts the representative nature of our form of government.

So, yes, we should exercise some grace in recognizing that each person's reasons for voting a certain way are their own and that they should answer only to their conscience and God for how they exercise this important freedom. But we should also be wise as serpents in recognizing that politicians want power, that they have plans to exercise that power, and that offering our support to them and casting votes for them simply because "the other guy is worse" means that their desires and their plans go unvetted and that regardless of individual reasons for casting a vote, politicians can and will point to their vote totals to justify many things beyond the scope of what actually got them those votes.

My position is that I will not offer support or vote for a candidate unless the full sum of his/her vision and agenda falls within acceptable philosophical and ideological parameters. Regardless of who they may be running against, I will not provide a statistic for governance to which my conscience objects. This is not a "wasted vote," in my opinion, because I am still exercising my right in a democratic process to withhold my support for certain intentions on how to wield governing power.

In my view, if the point of democracy is to have government that represents you, then voting for government that does not represent you is a waste of the process.

Justin Stapley is a graduate student at Utah Valley University, studying constitutional governance, civics, and law. He is the founding and executive director of the Freemen Foundation, editor-in-chief of the Freemen News-Letter, and the state director for the Utah Reagan Caucus. @JustinWStapley