Did Mark Twain say, “If anything depended on elections, we wouldn’t be allowed to participate in them”?

The American writer is often credited with the phrase that voting in elections is pointless. We checked to see if Mark Twain actually said this.

The statement that voting in elections does not decide anything can be found on the largest Russian-language websites, where quotes from famous people are collected: Socratify.net, "Quotes.info", City.net etc. All these resources are attributed to the author Samuel Clemens, who published his works under the pseudonym Mark Twain. Like a quote from Mark Twain, this expression is published in numerous public places in "VKontakte", as well as users Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and other social networks. At one time, this expression was associated with the writer and famous people - for example, a journalist Sergey Dorenko in 2017.

The expression, supposedly belonging to one of the main American writers, became quite popular in the West a few years ago. Then our foreign colleagues drew attention to it and verified the authenticity of the quote. AND Snopes, And FactCheck.org, and Australian project AAP We found out that Mark Twain did not make the statement about the meaninglessness of elections. More recently, these findings confirmed fact checkers from Vox Ukraine.

FactCheck.org contacted with Robert Hirst - curator collections notes and papers of Mark Twain, which is housed in the library of the University of California at Berkeley. The expert denied the connection between the phrase about the meaninglessness of elections and the famous writer, noting that “half of the quotes on the Internet attributed to Mark Twain are not Mark Twain.” Moreover, the statement being verified contradicts the views of the writer himself, who in 1905 stated: “We have a huge advantage in this country that other countries don’t have. When something becomes absolutely unbearable for people, people can rise up and throw it away. This is the best asset we have, the ballot box.”

AAP interviewed several more experts in an attempt to obtain at least some evidence that the quote is correctly attributed to Twain. Twain scholar and expert Barbara Schmidt said the phrase does not appear in "any known work" by the writer. A representative of the Twain House Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, supported Hearst's claims that the statement about the election was just one of many pseudo-quotes from the writer that did not actually belong to him. Our colleagues did not find this statement in the archive of letters of Mark Twain, who digitized University of Virginia.

Snopes draws Please note that the quotation about elections is presented in different sources in different formulations, for example: “If voting made a difference, it would be prohibited” or “If voting made a difference, it would not be allowed.” Our colleagues discovered the earliest mention of the tested phrase in 1976 (Mark Twain died back in 1910) in the small American newspaper Lowell Sun. Robert Borden in a short note writes: “The concept of voting and electing representatives is fundamentally dishonest and fraudulent. If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal! It is impossible for a politician to legally represent anyone because he was elected by secret ballot by a small percentage of voters.” Apparently, the author does not mention Twain.

Note that the quote being verified was attributed not only to the famous writer. This expression is also sometimes associated with activist Philip Berrigan and writer Emma Goldman, but in these cases it is not no evidence that the statement is actually theirs. In 1987, British politician Ken Livingstone released book entitled “If Elections Made a Difference, They Would Be Canceled,” however, this fact speaks not so much about the authorship of the phrase (especially since in Livingston’s version it differs from the most common formulation of the quote attributed to Mark Twain), but about its prevalence in the English-speaking world already in the 1980s.

In 2020, a study on the election quote, published Center for Mark Twain Studies, a division of Elmira College in New York. American Literature Specialist Matthew Seibold I tried to understand when the phrase about the meaninglessness of voting began to be associated specifically with Mark Twain. The earliest such mention that the researcher was able to find on social networks dates back to November 4, 2008 - on that day the presidential elections were held in the United States. At first he tweet didn't attract much attention. However, a year later, three accounts at once began to publish the phrase quite often and methodically - by 2010, it became viral precisely as an alleged statement by Mark Twain. Like the Snopes fact-checkers, Seybold traces the phrase's origins back to the 1970s and suggests that it originated among American anarchist activists.

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Snopes. ‘If Voting Made a Difference, They Wouldn’t Let Us Do It’
2. FactCheck.org. Fake Mark Twain 'Quote' Mocks Voting
3. AAP. Quote on voting doesn't tally as Mark Twain
4. UC Berkeley. Mark Twain Papers
5. Center for Mark Twain Studies. The Apocryphal Twain: “If Voting Made Any Difference, They Wouldn't Let Us Do It.”