Not Voting Is Silence & Silence Is Consent
There are four men and a woman. Some of the men wish to have sex with the woman and so they agree to vote on it. The woman does not cast a vote. Did she consent?
Silence is NOT consent.
But not voting is not silence.
Not voting is the woman refusing to allow the decision of whether or not the men have sex with her be based on the majority decision and walking the fuck away. It is decidedly NOT consenting to the result of the vote.
...But if everyone else thinks that's the case, both "not voting" and "being silent" are really, really, really, really bad strategies that reliably and repeatedly result in "the worst possible outcome."
This is because cybernetic systems are not bound by simple logic, like the hard sciences are. All cybernetic systems are inherently capable of dishonesty and adaptation. So, if they have convinced an army of violent people that votes should determine outcomes, you have two choices if the outcomes they favor are evil:
In this example, the men are all very strong, well-armed rapists who don't care if the woman consents or not, and the woman is in a rohypnol-induced stuper because her drink was poisoned against her consent and without her knowledge, and the rapists' accomplices are all the stupid "witnesses" (the voters) who listen to them when they say "she just had too much to drink."
Understanding that the current system is coercive does ABSOLUTELY nothing to stop it. ...As opposed to spreading information about voir dire, which DOES actually stop the victimization of the innocent that the system depends on.
I can be fine with this. The point is that those that wish to claim that silence is consent and, from that, not voting being a form of consent, have an obvious flaw in their logic. Silence is not necessarily consent. But more than that, refusing to vote is anything but silence.
If refusing to vote were 'silence' then there would be no conversation about it. But for being silent consent, it sure seems to create plenty of discussion and piss off the people who want the government that that 'silence' is allegedly consenting to.