"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal"

Emma Goldman’s aphorism slices at the heart of liberal democracy’s self-image. It implies that electoral rituals are permitted precisely because they pose limited threat to entrenched power. If ballots routinely produced transformative redistribution of wealth or authority, institutions aligned with that power would suppress them, as they have often suppressed strikes, radical newspapers, or insurgent assemblies.

The target is not participation itself but the faith that casting a vote exhausts one’s civic duty. Elections can aggregate preferences, but the menu of options is curated by funding structures, party gatekeeping, media frames, and legal barriers, gerrymandering, ballot access rules, voter suppression, first-past-the-post duopolies. Within those constraints, outcomes tend to rotate managers more than alter the underlying operating system.

History lends nuance. Suffrage expansions, civil-rights protections, and social insurance were, at moments, secured through elections. Yet they rarely emerged from the ballot box alone; they were pried loose by movements that made noncompliance costly, labor organizing, mass protest, boycotts, and courtroom battles. Once movements faded, policy drift and corporate influence often diluted the gains, confirming Goldman’s worry about system resilience.

The line also reads as a warning about co-optation. Power can accommodate symbolic concessions while neutralizing structural threats: defang an antitrust agenda while celebrating representation; criminalize disruptive protest while encouraging “get-out-the-vote” drives. Voting becomes a pressure valve, venting discontent without opening the furnace.

Taken as counsel rather than nihilism, the aphorism urges a broadened repertoire: vote when it helps harm reduction; organize workplaces; build mutual aid networks; run independent media; contest budgets; practice direct action; defend civil liberties that make all this possible. Legitimacy rests on more than turnout; it rests on people’s capacity to act together beyond election day. If authorities would ban practices that truly shift power, citizens should cultivate precisely those practices, and guard the right to do so. In every generation.