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My whole take is that your individual vote is meaningless, but as soon as you participate in discussions with other people about your vote with the attitude of treating it seriously and thoughtfully, suddenly your vote regains meaning. You play an important role that can only be seen in aggregate, but can be seen clearly. You affirm the importance of the vote, and equally as important, you have the opportunity to nudge someone's viewpoint. In an optimistic view, if you speak with say 15 people about what or who you want to vote for, and change 1 person's mind and nudge 2 others, this chain can self-propagate. If those people -- even just the one! -- speak with 15 people, then you could have a distributed albeit real and tangible effect. It's also on an order of magnitude greater than your singular vote.
As they say about a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear, if you cast your vote without ever speaking your intentions to another soul, it may as well not have happened. Talk about it, and you get a drastic paradigm shift. That's my take.
I'll even go out on a limb for a bit and say that if people truly care about an issue, and achieve a sensible majority about it, sometimes there's a time lag (occasionally pretty long) but the US democratic system usually ends up representing these opinions at the end of the day. For example, I'm bullish on Congress banning individual stock trades within the decade, even though classic political microeconomics/game theory says this would be irrational.
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