I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
Indigenous Action did a great write-up on this topic. Although to be completely honest, the point of this thread was really to condemn the DNC delegates specifically. Actually, I brought up voting at all in this thread in response to the suggestion that I am:
Willing to let lgbt, people of color, students, poor people and the working class be oppressed and possibly murdered.
As a poor grad student, and sibling to two lovely LGBT POC for whom I would literally kill to protect, this is a particularly offensive implication (from a different user!) that I often see bundled with pro-electoralism rhetoric, so I preemptively brought in Colin Ward’s article against voting.
What, in your view, needs to be done?
In the large, abolish all authority and hierarchy by popular revolution. If that is impossible, then approximate it as best as possible in the real world using a basis of popular liberatory actions emulating the end goal.
In the small, these delegates could use their power to physically and logistically disrupt the DNC until at least the US ending weapons transfers is secured. For everyone else, support protesters for Gaza in your life, show up to the protests if you can, do direct actions [1] if you can … do nothing if you have to, but most importantly, don’t cooperate with the war machine!
I hope this clarifies what I meant by saying:
Voting is orthogonal to what needs to be done.
Because while voting doesn’t necessarily hurt direct action efforts [2], it doesn’t help either. It’s just a completely independent class of activity. It’s like if, on a typical x-y plane (where the x and y axes are assumed to be orthogonal), we need to move in (let’s say) the positive x direction, and people keep spamming inputs in the y direction.
[1] Just the first part of section J.2, not including J.2.1 and onward. The rest is supplementary.
[2] There is an argument to be made (and I believe the article I cited makes it) that activism for voting takes time and energy that would otherwise be spent on direct action. Also, technically speaking, voting does literally take time away from direct action for the amount of time you’re waiting to vote and actually in the booth, but I’m an engineer so I’m willing to neglect small-valued terms 😆.