Photo by Gage Skidmore

If you can’t vote for yourself, why bother voting at all? That appears to be the tack taken by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich today, who said that he will not be voting in the Republican presidential primary in Virginia, where he resides but is not on the ballot, NBC News reports.

Though Gingrich still brands himself as a son of Georgia (albeit one born in Harrisburg, Pa.), he has resided in McLean, Va. for more than a decade. But his campaign failed last year to submit the 10,000 signatures required to get on the ballot for today’s primary. (Same goes for Rick Santorum; only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are on the ballot.)

So rather than cast a write-in for himself or even toss one of his rivals a relatively impact-free vote—Romney, despite some ankle-biting from his detractors, is the overwhelming favorite to win most of Virginia’s 46 delegates—Gingrich is sitting this one out.

“Newt and Callista are not casting a ballot in Virginia and they did not request an absentee one,” a Gingrich spokesman told NBC. “When given a choice between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, they could not pick either one,” the spokesman continued.

Gingrich, instead, has been focusing the bulk of his Super Tuesday campaign on winning his adopted-but-unofficial home state. The online prediction market InTrade gives him a 98.5 percent chance of winning Georgia.