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I have a two-fold argument that single-mindedly sticking to unsophisticated meme replication like "voting is a civic duty" is a great thing and major reason why the civilization keeps working.
First, let us consider the probability of your act of voting mattering. It is minuscule. Only person affected by the decision is ... you yourself, and perhaps handful of other people in your immediate vicinity. (Like, you get to argue about voting or not voting with your dad.) Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.
On the other hand, the above is true for any action most of people take, nearly all of the time. Anything I do barely matters in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, sure, my daily actions have consequences that affect my life outcomes and my family and my work, but all of them would be lost to rounding errors in national statistics. Yet the aggregate sum of barely noticeable actions of millions of other people results in what people call, everyday experience.
For me, this kind of naive everyman existentialism makes voting feel less special kind of stupid. It is equal kind of stupid as everything else in my life: practically nobody cares, except me and those near me. Suppose I quit my job and go live as a hermit in the woods. Personal tragedy, statistically indistinguishable from a rounding error.
This brings us to the second part of the argument: The only way the aggregate can do anything organized is by adopting mental frameworks that strongly encourage keep going in the face of absurdity that your actions barely matter.
Let's talk about something not related to elections. Why have we not dissolved to total anarchy of constant thievery and villainy? Perhaps because the people who disregard the duty "not to steal and mug" get arrested? A laughable notion: the police and judicial system just barely manage to arrest and punish some of the most egregious criminals. The system can project up some deterrent and remove the most constantly nasty part of the population to prisons, but that is of concern only to marginally criminally inclined. I presume you're in the US: According to BJS statistics, estimate rate of violent crime victmization is 22.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons in the US. To pick another statistic, about 1,087,000 arrests for simple or aggravated assault were reported to SRS and NIBRS. That is about 5.5 per 1,000 persons. 4:1 ratio. (The other arrests for violent crimes won't really affect the rate.) Rate of convictions I can't easily find, it is probably smaller. It is a very crude calculation, but it suggests that majority of violent crime won't result in an arrest.
If a significant part of the population decided to embrace the thug lifestyle and loot shops and mug people for living starting next Tuesday (and be any determined about it), all the combined law enforcement in the country would have extreme difficulties in keeping up. (In average 20th century civil war, actual fighting was done by approximately 5% to 10% of the population.)
How do you avoid 10% of the population descending into scum and villainy just because they realize they can? Everyone rationally computes the utilitarian calculus and/or studies ethical philosophy and concludes, "bad idea"? Not a behavior observed in the real world. Far more commonly observed successful strategy: average Joe single-mindedly sticks to principles like, "I will not steal or rob because it is wrong" that are based on not-so-deep ethical framework they probably misunderstand and would fall apart in a scholarly argument. Which brings us near to the conclusion of my essay.
In a modern society, barely anything that each individual does, matters. To successfully do anything that matters, individuals must coordinate their actions. Thus, they need to convince themselves that doing it is worth it despite it barely mattering. You don't convince most people to do irrational things with rational arguments, but instilling irrationally strong principles that do not budge. If the "voting is a civic duty" party is large enough, in aggregate they may decide an election. When they do not, just by existing they at least force the candidates to hold a campaign, which matters less but isn't fully inconsequential.
The probability of your vote mattering is tiny, but if it does matter it matters for hundreds of millions of people, which makes up for the small probability of it mattering.
There's also the question of how you count whether a vote "matters" *which amounts to the same thing phrased differently). If someone wins by 1000 votes, nobody's vote mattered in the sense that their vote alone would have changed the result. But 1000 people's votes mattered in the sense that as a group it would have changed the result, and each of the 1000 people should get credit for 1/1000 of a result mattering. And it's arbitrary in what order you count the votes--you could just as well say that the first 1000 votes mattered as you could say that the last one did.
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I think the error here is comparing yourself to an entire nation. If you are making an argument like "Sure it only affects my family and friends," then you're rationality is poorly calibrated.
Voting does particularly stress this because you're personal affect really is so small, and in presidential elections the electoral college schemes to reduce it even further in most cases. In this case I think it is worth finding some other process than number crunching to justify the effort because it does break down if everyone stops doing it.
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Besides deciding who wins the state, votes may also have more subtle influences. Kang winning by 48% or by 80% of the popular vote might not change which drooling alien gets to sit in the White House, but it will drastically change how the Kodos party reacts to the defeat. In the former case, they might decide that they need to mobilize their people in key battleground states more, in the other case they might decide to completely reinvent themselves, perhaps become more like the Kang party.
Of course, in countries with proportional representation, you can signal more than a single bit.
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The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.
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