Americans fetishize voting. Granted, exercising the right seems an important act of democratic citizenship, and denial of the franchise typically accompanies the denial of a whole range of civil rights and liberties. But our focus on voting, and especially national horse-races whose conclusions result from the plebiscite, too often distracts us from the real work of citizenship, which is studious attention and attendance to the near-at-hand. Democracy certainly involves speaking, but more significantly, requires seeing things clearly and for what they are, and then responding accordingly. Our attentiveness wanes at a distance or when mediated through someone else’s “lens.” Politics operates more humanely microscopically than telescopically.

　　When Tocqueville toured America he observed that the New England Town Hall was the nursery of democracy. This direct participation in democratic life prepared citizens not only to exercise their votes responsibly, but to engage in the deliberative processes that determined the contours of their lives. It disciplined their inclinations and interests. Tocqueville’s observations draw our attention to the scale of democratic life: the near-at-hand should always command more of our attention and our allegiance than the distant. When some far-off place becomes the seat of power, and if those running it overwhelm the acts of citizens participating in local governance—if indeed power displaces those of us who voted these representatives into those distant seats in the first place—then voting, along with paying taxes, becomes not only the preeminent act of citizenship but the sole one. In other words, voting then compromises citizenship, if not destroys it altogether.

　　Worse yet: when power is distant, as in our day it is, then we cant possibly know our representatives except in mediated form: through corporately-owned news sources and campaign ads, both of which are mendacious and untrustworthy. This is as much to say that we cannot know our representatives at all, and this problem intensifies at the presidential level, where our ignorance and intensity completely diverge. At its nadir it results in anti-votes: I don’t like either candidate, but I will vote against the one I dislike most.

　　We no longer operate democratically if by “democracy” we understand people having some sort of direct say in and control of the decisions that affect their lives. The central role of speech in democratic life refers to our ability to voice our preferences and have that voice be recognized and respected, which means in turn that our voices are heard and not drowned out in the roars of mass democracy.

　　One important paradox of our current politics results from the fact that we consider our votes important precisely at the time they have become devalued. This claim may seem controversial to readers, many of whom may recall the just and noble struggle for the franchise that defined previous ages. I am not arguing against voting, I am rather arguing against the various forces that have led to its devaluation, including our tendency to think that by having voted we have performed the ultimate act of civic duty rather than a minimal one.

　　What sorts of factors devalue the vote? One is when we make decisions based on imperfect or distorted information. Political campaigns are essentially exercises in sophistry, and the pervasive negativity and lying of campaigns undermine public confidence not only in the results but in the resulting structures of governance. Why should we trust “experts” when they tell us elections are safe and secure (which I believe they are) when they are wrong about so much else? Why should we believe that someone will work cooperatively with the other party when that person just spent the last year calling his or her opponent alternately a fascist or a communist? Why should we expect someone who approves ads full of smears and lies to be suddenly trustworthy once the election concludes?

　　Another way to devalue the vote is to offer people meaningless choices. There are different ways of accomplishing this. Having candidates who so closely resemble each other that voters conclude “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between them will lead voters, reasonably, to opt out of the process. Or, if people perceive actors behind the scenes actually run things, and the candidate is merely a puppet of those hidden forces, then voters might decide they don’t want to play charades. Or, if people are presented with a stark choice but regard both candidates as more or less equally objectionable, they might still vote but not feel good about it and hold their nose while they do it. In this, yet another “most important election of our lifetime,” we have two candidates neither of whom the majority of Americans view favorably. What does that do to our sense of connection to the whole system, other than make us think that somehow the thing is rigged against our interests?

　　Only by paying attention to the near-at-hand does the relationship between voting and citizenship become clear.

　　The Antifederalists understood this problem well, for they thought voting mattered when we voted for people we knew and held in high esteem. Only by having engaged citizens in all other areas of life could elected officials show themselves worthy of our trust. As importantly, only if representatives would reconnect with those citizens by returning to the places they represented (for they don’t represent only people) could the people remain confident that what mattered to them, mattered. Our system is in crisis mainly because government officials, both elected and non-elected, do not share in the fate and (mis)fortunes of those over whom they govern; and those people in turn, reasonably, assume that those who govern don’t really care.

　　We also devalue the vote when we treat all ballots as if they are equal, especially a problem in a system that values secret ballots. Not everyone who votes is equally well-informed, equally committed to the public good, equally contributing to public life in other ways, or driven by an equally significant set of interests. The fact that bad citizens can cancel the vote of the ideal citizen casts some doubt on the intelligence of the whole system. It upholds the principle of equality before the law, but at a price. Because bad voters water down the votes of good voters, Jason Brennan in his The Ethics of Voting argued we have a moral obligation not to encourage ill-informed or narrowly interested people to vote. A low-voter turnout rate may be the salutary consequence of such deterrence. Indeed, it may even signal moral rectitude for those who opt-out. This deficit of knowing results from an inability of people in our complex and hypermobile system to attend to one another, distracted as we are by space and gadgets.

　　We haven’t yet touched on the most significant means for devaluing the vote, which is the way we devalue anything: by making more of it. The math is pretty simple. If I am one of three votes, my vote carries a lot of weight. For every person I add to the deliberation, I diminish the value of my vote in the process. Dennis Mueller, a leading advocate of public choice theory, observed that you have an equal chance of being run over by a car on the way to the poll as your vote is the decisive one in a presidential election. So unless your candidate’s losing is a bigger issue to you than being killed by a car, it makes no rational sense to vote.

　　The essence of citizenship is not voting but participation—voting is but one mode of participation. Neighbors working shoulder to shoulder building and maintaining parks and playgrounds, making their streets safe, running their local schools, lending a helping hand to the disadvantaged, responding to each other’s needs in emergencies, watching out for one another’s children, caring for their little corner of the world as if those places mattered, which they do—these are the essential practices of citizenship because they’re moral practices. Good citizens realize that their obligations don’t resolve in delegating political or social agency to someone else, especially if, as in our Constitutional system, one assumes that agents will seldom act in the principal’s best interests. This problem worsens when we consider that we often choose between deputized agents we don’t know and, more importantly, can’t trust. So how is delegating our authority to such persons a moral act?

　　All this relates to the republican argument that democratic practices do not scale well. Citizens are connected to the federal government on their end by the thin and fragile thread of voting, but the central government covers citizens’ lives with a thick web of often indiscernible and unintelligible rules and regulations. This asymmetry is a central problem of our so-called democracy. What does it say when only 15-27 percent of citizens will vote in local elections, where their vote has the most mathematical weight and they vote on the issues of greatest importance to them, while 70 percent of them will cast a vote for a person they don’t know to run a sprawling bureaucracy they don’t understand? Is this what we would expect in a healthy democracy? If part of the justification for voting is that it creates accountability, why do we have a powerful centralized administrative state that is neither transparent nor responsive to the will of voters?

　　None of this is an argument for not voting; rather, it is an argument for voting from the bottom of the ballot up. Seeing and paying attention to things immediately visible and then and only then casting our vision to the horizon is not only good sense, it is how we are built. Our sight fades at a distance, objects become blurred and indistinct. Only by paying attention to the near-at-hand does the relationship between voting and citizenship become clear, that we are to attend to the concerns of our community and one another fully and completely and attentively, and not only in November, and not by designating someone else to act on our behalf.