evidence: The Apocryphal Twain: "If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it." [...] Twain was not cynical about elections because he believed they couldn’t make a difference, but because he believed his countrymen failed to appreciate the difference they could make. [...] By the mid-’80s, the sentiment was ingrained enough in the British Labour Party, than Ken Livingstone gave the book associated with his first campaign for Parliament the ironic title, If Voting Made A Difference, They’d Abolish It (1987).