If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

The line expresses a radical skepticism toward electoral politics: if the ballot truly threatened entrenched power, those who benefit from the existing order would simply prohibit it. The aphorism frames voting as a safety valve—permitted because it channels dissent into a controlled, symbolic act rather than materially redistributing power. Read in the context of anarchist critique, it implies that genuine social change comes less from periodic participation in state institutions than from direct action, mutual aid, labor organizing, and other forms of collective pressure outside official channels. Its punchy irony also functions rhetorically to puncture civic pieties about democracy by highlighting how legal systems often protect property and authority first.