There's a lot of debate going on about whether libertarians should vote for Gary or Trump and whatnot, so I'd like to defend the view that "voting in a political system is most of the time immoral". Since it's a libertarian subreddit and most of us would agree on most of the basic premises such as "the state is an apparatus of coercion and violence" and "it is immoral to force someone" etc. I'll take them granted and won't discuss them and my main premises will be based on these notions. Afaik in USA "the government" and "the state" refers to same thing, but i nmy country (and other countries as well) they're not that interchangable. In my context, "government" refers to "who runs the state apparatus"

Here's my case:

1. It's wrong to use violence or threat of violence except self-defense
2. The state is inherently violent
3. Governments use the state to reach their goals
4. Governments are inherently violent (premise 2)
5. It is wrong to encourage or makesomebody to use violence
6. Voting makes a political party run the government/the state
7. Therefore voting is immoral (p. 2 & 5)

But there could be exceptions, the exception I imagine would be something like this:

Let's say it's electional season and there's a really great evil (NSDAP) which will take people's lives and properties etc. Its chance of running the state is high (polls show I) and there are other two available candidates. Let's call them Democrats and Libertarians. Democrats' polls show that they have approximately I of the votes and Libertarians have %1. I'd argue that in this case morally right thing to do is voting for Democrats so that you can defeat the great evil by using relatively small evil. But if you vote for Libertarians that would be immoral since they don't have a chance to win and your vote is going to waste and you won't at least have a chance to stop the great evil.

Now there of course will be objections. The first and strongest one that comes to my mind is: "In a libertarian society there will be institutions to use force/violence too since there will be police, courts, military etc. By your logic libertarianism is also immoral."

It's true that libertarian society will face violence, too. But the problem with the state is, it's illegitimate. If I were to eat in a restaurant but refused to pay, it wouldn't be wrong/immoral for the owner to take money from me by using force because there's an implicit contract between consumers and producers. But it's quite different for the state. Michael Huemer and Anthony De Jasay deal with it perfectly.

Beside that there could be something wrong with my premises though I couldn't find one.

Btw, has anyone read Brennan's The Ethics of Voting? I'm very busy nowadays, I haven't read yet so I'm wondering on a scale to 1 to 10, what would be your score?