"If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it."

Despite the contentious candidates, insipid scandals, insidious corruption, raucous rallies, deleterious diatribes, and all-around farcical shit storm of a dystopian presidential election cycle — with all its rigged opprobrium — millions of Americans will cast aside logic, pull the wool over their eyes, and angrily take to the polls on Tuesday.

Because illusions about participating in a loosely-defined democratic kleptocracy — hammered into our brains through indoctrination equating voting to patriotic duty — have replaced the higher call to critically consider the magnitude of this mess, people still think voting matters.

But voting — at least for the foreseeable future — isn't mandatory.

We've been led to believe this illusion of options veiling the tightly-wrought control of limited dissent represents our only hope for a new term's better legislation and governance — when the mechanisms behind that veil instead operate purely with their own enrichment and survival in mind.

Sure, people might play the lesser-evil card to justify voting for any one of these criminals and hypocrites, including those trying the third-party route, but the 2016 election cycle — with all its incendiary madness — has handily proven the need for massive reform.

You might be one of the innumerable weary voters begrudgingly heading to the polls to cast a vote for your preferred lesser literal evil — wondering why you continue participating in this exercise of utter futility.

There is good news. Something you likely haven't considered. Something so revolutionary, it might not have flirted with your other considerations — but so freeing and fundamental in its simplicity, it has a reputation for slaying longheld ideologies and extricating those who choose it from the emotional conflict inherent in lesser-evilism.

Just don't vote.

Don't participate in a system claiming to uphold your freedoms while simultaneously quashing them through the trick of severely circumscribed choices. And before you flatly reject this concept for radicalism, consider the following albeit partial list fleshing out why abstaining from the vote isn't actually as kooky as you think.

1. Voting only validates the failing system. By casting a vote, you're telling politicians you accept things the way they are — one of the worst educational programs in the Western world, a healthcare system mashup benefiting overgrown pharmaceutical and insurance companies, militarized police, and so on.

2. Voting for a lesser of two evils — which the largest swath of the voting public will do today — equates an acceptance of evil. Just because one candidate seems on the surface to be less horrendous than the other, doesn't mean the other isn't also horrendous in their own right. When you continue, election after election, to vote for the lesser evil, evil always wins.

3. Are you pro-war? Do you want young Americans to travel abroad to kill other nations' civilians, and be killed themselves, for hegemonic usurpation of natural resources for the profit of government welfare-backed corporations, Big Banks, and industries? This is not defense of the country. This is not fighting for freedom. This is hubristic imperialism enforced by unadulterated violence. When you vote, you support needless war and death.

4. Voting is state-sponsored force. In every nation, and particularly the U.S., people have stark differences in values, religion, beliefs, ideology, culture — the list is endless. By casting a ballot, you're forcing your specific set of beliefs onto everyone — whether or not they agree. If your chosen lesser evil wins, the opposite is true — that is, even if that candidate follows through on their campaign vows … which brings us to …

5. Presidential candidates are advertisers — they excel at propagandizing themselves as a tidy package of promises — but they rarely, if ever, follow through. President Obama originally ran on a platform of stark opposition to the Iraq War, and even somehow won the Nobel Peace Prize — but the U.S. military never left Iraq — and his administration just sent hundreds more troops there to fight. Campaign promises, by design, deceive voters into thinking things will be different 'this time' — voting is a display of gullibility.

6. When you vote, the establishment wins. Always. In fact, the establishment's only interest is self-preservation. This time around, Hillary Clinton obviously embodies establishment principles — but if you bought Donald Trump's anti-establishment rhetoric (see number 5), you've been duped already. Not only does he have a longstanding relationship with the Clintons — which should've tipped off the attentive among us — in just one example, Trump plans to appoint a Goldman Sachs-George Soros insider who has donated large sums to Clinton's campaign as Treasury Secretary. Soros, as you might be aware, is a billionaire globalist and extreme left-leaning influencer of foreign policy — which brings us to …

7. Voters are presented with two choices, blue or red — but they'll get purple either way. American politics are a duopoly, and though slight differences on social issues indeed exist, larger institutional matters — militarized police, education, the military-industrial machine, private prisons, etc. — are a general constant driving the rest. Thanks to the bottomless pockets of lobbyists, nothing substantial ever changes.