Depoliticising the Polls: Voting Abstention and Moral Disagreement

Do citizens have a duty to abstain from voting when they cannot vote well? Jason Brennan has recently argued that, since citizens have a duty not to engage in harmful activities and bad voting is a harmful activity, citizens have a duty to abstain from voting badly. In this reply, I argue that Brennan dismisses the moral disagreements that unavoidably pervade the very idea of bad voting in a democratic society and provides a de-politicised and incomplete account of what voting badly means. Without a sound definition of bad voting, Brennan's argument fails.