> Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election).
The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent.
Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling.
Actually, it is. If a third party gets more than 5% of the popular vote, they have rights to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund[1] which can further help in future years to get said third party elected.
I will chime in with how it is too. Since there are such tight margins in the popular vote, and large percentage participation gaps, when people vote a protest candidate it has the effect of 'pulling' votes from one of the two mainstream candidates. Ross Perot in the 1992 and 1996 Elections was credited or accused of changing the outcome of the election by taking votes away from Bush (the elder).
The result were more Perot like ideas being pushed into both parties to prevent that from happening.
Protest voting, even in rigged elections like Putin's election in Russia, are very effective political action.
If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election.
This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary.
>The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1]
No, the US presidential election process works that way; that's one election for one office, there are many more offices you vote for than just president and all that voting matters and is absolutely worth more than a no vote.
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws.
But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway.
Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
The difference between a third party getting 1% of the vote versus 10% could have some impact on politics even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.
But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
If you're left with the choice between the lesser or two evils on how to run the country. It is very _very_ important that you get the _lesser_ of those two evils.
For that matter, why even bring up the electoral college? Even if the president were elected by a majority vote, the odds of the election being a tie or decided by a single vote is incredibly small—almost certainly too small to be able to rationally justify the time spent researching candidates or even traveling to the polling location.
It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
> So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
Yes, but it's extremely unlikely that your vote would sway the result, and I'm operating under the assumption that you can only control your own decision to vote.
> So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
You're confusing two things. I would never try to persuade people that the sum of everyone's votes doesn't matter, because it obviously does (discounting for the moment the possibility of election fraud). But I would try to persuade individuals that their vote will not matter with a very high probability.
Even though this is often phrased in such a way that it almost sounds like a contradiction or paradox, it's not at all. It's analogous to the lottery: the more people that play, the higher the chance that someone will win (assuming random picks), but one person buying a single lottery ticket has such a small probability of winning that I would recommend against relying on the lottery to change one's financial situation.
The sum of everyone's votes is made up of a bunch of single individual votes. If you persuade enough individuals to not cast their single vote, then the election outcome could be swayed.
So sure, telling individual people their vote doesn't matter is basically true. But how many people have you told?! :-)
Wrong basis. By voting for someone who won't win you can claim that you tried and failed to improve things, and that it was everyone else (who voted for the winner/mainstream candidate) who causes all our problems and is responsible.
Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election).
The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent.
Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering