By: Dylan Allman
The first article aboard Bartholomew Roberts’s ship gave every man a vote in affairs of moment, and the Crown hanged men for sailing under it. Captain Charles Johnson set the articles down in 1724 from the testimony of men who had sailed under them, and the right to vote stands at the head of a list that goes on to forbid gambling at cards and to require a clean cutlass. Roberts had been aboard a few weeks when the crew voted him captain, after an ambush on Príncipe killed Howell Davis. The man who argued for him called the ship a commonwealth. The crew elected its captain and removed him by majority. A second elected officer, the quartermaster, divided the food and the plunder, so the man who led the fight never controlled the pay. Those votes carried weight because every man aboard was armed. The hull belonged to the crew and was held by the men who sailed it. Every office stood open to recall on any day, and a captain who lost the crew lost the quarterdeck that same afternoon.
Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives Congress the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal, a license to take prizes at sea under the seal of the state. A privateer carried the paper, brought his captures before an admiralty court, and sailed in the state’s name. The same act without the paper was piracy, and the same man was hanged for it. The ballot is the voter’s letter of marque. It licenses one act, the choice of which party holds the state’s powers to tax and to seize for the coming term, and it reads the same whichever name is checked.
Georgia’s Libertarians held an automatic ballot line at every general election from 1988 until the 2024 vote fell short of the threshold. The law offered a way back that asked for more than seventy thousand signatures, and on July 10 the state party carried a few hundred to the Secretary of State’s office and stopped. Ohio demands three percent of the governor’s vote on November 3 and grants status through 2030 in return. Arkansas demands a new petition every cycle, and the state party delivered 13,238 signatures in November 2025 against a requirement of 10,000, for the eighth time.
The Commission on Presidential Debates was incorporated in 1987 as a private corporation under an agreement between the Republican and Democratic parties, and since 2000 it has required candidates to average 15 percent in five national polls. Each of these is a wall maintained by the people it protects, and the toll is paid in signatures and in a poll number that a candidate cannot reach without the stage the number gates.
The man who refuses the ballot says the license lends legitimacy to the court that issues it, and that every ballot cast tells that court its jurisdiction is accepted. The privateer answers that the paper opens the harbor. A ship with a commission could enter port, sell its cargo, and refit under the sovereign’s guns; a ship without one depended on the handful of harbors that looked away. A pirate with any sense reads the chart, takes the harbor when it is open, sails without one when it is shut, and treats the paper as a pass through a wall someone else built. The ballot may fall far short of the open ship Roberts’s crew sailed, but it exists whether the pirate likes it or not.
A second golden age of piracy has begun. Every enclosure the Crown and its chartered companies raised around knowledge, software, culture, and communication is dissolving at once, and anyone with a laptop now holds tools that once belonged to a studio, a guild, a monopoly, or a state. The wall held for exactly as long as climbing it cost more than paying the toll, and that price has collapsed. Privacy tools hide you from the watchers. Open-source alternatives replace the landlord’s software. Encrypted channels and decentralized networks carry speech that no platform can revoke. Shadow libraries keep what a publisher wanted dark, and copies pass from hand to hand outside the licensing cartels. Each of these secures your sovereignty without asking a state to sanction it.
Piracy is the rebellion a free person owes a world that sells ownership as a rental, hoards creativity behind monopoly, and bolts human potential to the far side of a digital gate. The charge that it is theft rests on an illusion, that culture can be owned, that copying is taking, and that your access to art and knowledge must pass through a monopoly the state enforces. The megacorporations lobbied governments until you became a tenant in your own digital life, renting your movies, your software, and your devices on terms you never set and accepting surveillance and forced obsolescence for the privilege of using what you bought.
Piracy tears up that contract. For millions of people it is the only way in, and that makes it access, education, and survival, a pressure valve that refuses to wait for permission. When copies cost nothing, the only thing left to sell is work worth paying for, and the rent collector has to compete for the first time since his charter was signed. That is the free market the charters were written to prevent, and the pirate delivers it at cost.
The ballot is one tool among a hundred, and it is the one the state hands out itself. The state sets every rule of its use, from the ballot line to the toll to the stage to the count. That makes it the most supervised tool of them all, the most siloed, and the slowest at moving anything. Growers and buyers broke the cannabis statutes for a generation before California’s voters approved medical use in 1996, and for sixteen years more before Colorado and Washington approved the adult market in 2012. Most states now license it. The ballot certified what outlaws had already built.
The Crown hands you a ballot and a sticker and sends you home certain that your duty to your own sovereignty has been paid in full. That certainty is the seduction. The Crown wants the ballot to look like the only door because it built the door, keeps the key, and writes the rules inside the room. Every other door opens without its permission. A ballot is the smallest thing a free person can do, and a person who stops there has filed the rest under somebody else’s job. The big lie says the vote is the whole of what a free person can do, and it works because the vote is real enough to feel like the whole.
Sovereignty is won in the fleet. Switch one tool you rent for one you own. Mirror the archive a publisher wants dark. Run the node. Host the fork. Download the file. Print the gun. Teach one person to do the same. Each of these changes what a statute can enforce before the next session convenes, and a forked repository is a vote no commission can disqualify. The goal holds across every one of them, the sovereignty of the individual and the end of every enclosure that stands between a person and what that person can make, copy, and keep.
Every gate is a chat window now, and a person with a laptop has a hundred sail. The ballot is one of them. Polls open on November 3. The colors are already up.
Dylan Allman is a libertarian writer and philosopher. You can find his work on dylanallman.info, and on X at @dylanallman.