Reading Bridget Meehan’s moving conundrum about voting in a society where no candidate who represented your convictions has ever stood for any election is to me, completely understandable and relatable and I am sure that a large number of people, especially leftists, are faced with the same frustration when another election rolls around.

When Stephen Shalom rejoins and argues for the necessity of sometimes voting, explaining the mechanics of voting and calculations that go into it and the real-world consequences of the various choices he is of course correct. I agree with Stephen, technically, that voting for the lesser evil is often the correct choice. What I think is missed in such a debate is the fact that elections are far less relevant in the political landscape of a society than what is assumed and that voting in elections is not significant political action.

Instead, I would argue that elections are not where the politics of a society changes. I understand it is easy to confuse elections with enacting change, after all, you vote and then, in theory, the people who rule you might change and with them also the politics, but this is a false sense. In fact, politics happen nonstop – there are groups in society who try to push it one way, and groups who try to push it another way. Some groups are powerful through an abundance of capital, leveraging capitalism, others are powerful through numbers, leveraging democracy, yet others leverage their status in society. The balance of power between these groups is the landscape in which elections happen and thus elections are merely a tallying mechanism of all the political work that has been done in between the elections. Who stands in the election, what kind of platform they have, what policies they promise to implement are all decided by the activities done in between. The real struggle does not happen on election day but in the intervening years.

Voting in elections is therefore something you should participate in but you shouldn’t spend more than 5 minutes on (or in democratically undeveloped countries like the US, wait in line for 8 hours in order to cast a vote or indeed to find out your voting right was arbitrarily taken away), before returning to the more important work of actually changing the political landscape in which elections happen.

Perhaps this process is best illustrated by a practical example. I live in the city of Maribor in Slovenia, home to a little more than 100.000 people. In 2012 the corrupt mayor of our town was forced to step down as a massive wave of protests rocked the city. While the protests were going on a group of citizens got together and wished not just a change of the mayor but also to change the way in which the city was run. In short, we believed that a lot of the problems in the city stemmed from a system set up in a way that allowed the elected politicians to largely ignore the wishes of the population. We named ourselves Initiative for City-Wide Assembly (Iniciativa Mestni Zbor – IMZ) and organized citizen assemblies in view of opening a political space in which regular citizens could get involved in the affairs of the city and create their own political voice. Very quickly the citizens in the assemblies identified one of the major systemic problems of our democratic system, namely there are no useful formal mechanisms for citizens to regularly take a direct part in the decisions. Among several changes that could improve this, participatory budgeting (PB) was identified, a mechanism through which citizens can directly democratically decide how to spend a part of the city’s investment budget.

So how to go about winning such a change? Vote for the right candidate? No. After the previous mayor resigned interim elections were called for the remaining 1,5 years of the previous mayor’s term. No candidate on the ballot supported the implementation of participatory budgeting. Worse, the Ministry of local self-governance held that PB is not compatible with the Slovenian legal system and thus it is impossible to implement in Slovenian municipalities. Both national associations of municipalities held the same view. So no matter who the citizens would decide to vote for, nothing would lead to PB being instituted.

Instead, people engaged in the assemblies went about changing the political landscape in which elections were held. We put in our volunteer time, we had no financing. We raised consciousness about PB in the assemblies at first, we found a legal solution for implementation, we argued for it in the media and by far most importantly we stopped citizens in the streets and talked to them about it. A year later, when regular elections rolled around again, significant numbers of citizens were informed and disposed positively toward PB. Furthermore, we collected over four thousand statements of support, demanding the implementation of PB in the municipality.

We never supported any candidate, we never lobbied with any candidate, we never talked about who to vote for, and we never tried to identify the lesser evil with regard to achieving PB. It was not necessary, because our past work changed the political landscape in the city, when the election rolled around every single one of the mayoral candidates responded to the newly created public sentiment and had the implementation of PB as part of their platform and all but one of the parties vying for seats in the city council also included that as part of their platform. So in two years, we moved from practically no one ever hearing of it, no candidate supporting it and every important organization in the field deeming it illegal to actual implementation. Now, almost a decade later, along with Maribor, more than a fifth of municipalities in Slovenia run PB and the number is steadily growing.

I am not claiming that it is easy, or that it is possible to achieve any policy change in two years, that if you just organize you can achieve the stars in short order. What I am saying is that if you do not organize then when it comes to elections all you do is passively participate in the tally of the results of other people’s work and it is highly likely you will be forced forever to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil. Instead of people agonizing over electoral choices we should be the ones forming our preferred policies and advocating for them, not to the politicians, but to fellow citizens. If we change the minds of citizens to the point that they demand something the electoral issues tend to sort themselves out.