In this sense, the ballot box is like a toll booth and the tolls collected by the government are the price of admission charged those who want to play the game. The voters are incidental kibitzers in the game at hand, not realizing that it is their lives and fortunes that are the real stakes of the game. Like all games, the winners take all, but in the game of politics, the contest is for control of a monopoly of power over all people within the jurisdiction. For all voters to have chosen to participate in politics on the basis that the winner takes all, not merely the table stakes, they would have entered that arena with the same expectation as a poker player prepared to bet his life on that game of chance. But politics is not merely a poker game nor is the poker player a realistic model for all voters.
Political elections are comparatively rare.
They occur only when called by the government. Then, the tally is strictly a nose-counting exercise. However, it appears that political voting has come to mean something much more sinister, if possible. The vote now represents a sanction of authority empowering some persons to rule not only the voter himself but all others as well, and for an indefinite time to come. By participating in political voting, the individual person abandons not only his hereditary sovereignty over himself but he also obligates his descendants to do likewise.