This chapter explores the uses and understandings of abstention and the blank vote in elections in nineteenth-century Europe. Building on a new understanding of politicisation and depoliticisation, this chapter shows that abstention could constitute a political act in and of itself. As a highly politicised practice of non-participation, it expressed the contestation of or the refusal to cooperate with dominant understandings of the vote. The chapter traces how nineteenth-century voters in Spain, France, and Britain converted practices understood as non-political into political ones, repoliticising a mode of action that governments understood to be—or at least wished to be—depoliticised. This chapter demonstrates how voters could repoliticise abstention and blank votes, either through symbolic practices or through the discursive reimagining of their political significance. Abstention and blank votes could be used to express dissatisfaction with contemporary regimes or dominant understandings of politics at the time, or to continue the electoral struggle after the ballots had been cast. Voters showed an aptitude for both politicising and, interestingly, strategically depoliticising these practices, demonstrating their agency in renegotiating the boundaries of the political.