> I get it. The system is broken, and there are no good choices to vote for (when a race is even contested at all), so why bother? Except that the reason why the system is broken in the first place is that no one shows up at any stage of the game.

The system is broken, but I think it's broken in a different way than what you're suggesting. It's not broken because people don't show up to vote. On the contrary, people don't show up to vote because the system is broken, and it's not just broken because there are only two relevant parties and corporations exert a lot of influence. It's broken because many people correctly calculate that the impact of their individual vote has less value than the cost of physically voting, and even less so than the cost of educating themselves about the candidates and issues.

The democracy in the US is especially broken for more specific reasons (like the two-party dominance and gerrymandering), but democracy in general is a bad way to aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people.

> It's broken because many people correctly calculate that the impact of their individual vote has less value than the cost of physically voting, and even less so than the cost of educating themselves about the candidates and issues.

Agreed but that becomes an issue if everyone thinks and behaves like that. That is, if individually everyone goes through the same thought process concluding that voting is not worthwhile for them on an individual basis what happens is that no one votes. There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.

> democracy in general is a bad way to aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people. That may be true. The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.

> There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.

Yes, that's true. In theory, as fewer people vote, the value of each vote goes up, and presumably there could be some equilibrium reached. Of course, I doubt that experiment would be allowed to complete without the government making significant fundamental changes.

But there's another closely related issue, which might explain why lots of people still vote despite my claim that it's irrational. My claim only considered the costs and benefits of the impact of a vote on the outcome of the election. But there are other benefits that many people receive from voting, namely, the feeling of doing one's civic duty (which many people are instructed to do from a young age) and the feeling of being part of rooting for a group (like a political party). The trouble with this class of benefits is that they are enjoyed by the voter whether or not the voter invests the time to research the candidates and issues (which is much more costly than the physical act of voting, but is ostensibly required according to the traditional civics class explanation of democracy). This theory predicts that voter education on the candidates and issues would be low, which is certainly the case in a few relevant polls I've seen.

> The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.

Plenty of suggestions are out there, but they're all obviously considered very radical in mainstream Western political philosophy. Most radical political philosophies you've heard of probably either aren't fundamentally democratic (like propertarian/market anarchism, anarcho-capitalism) or are democratic in a different sense (like direct action or direct democracy in left-libertarianism). For an alternative that is slightly less radical, though still politically unfeasible for any major government in the foreseeable future, take a look at futarchy, which combines democratic voting with (money-based) prediction markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy

As someone who doesn't vote, let me explain why. It's not because I'm cynical. It's because I'm fine with whoever wins. Both parties are pretty close to each other on the issues I care about. Neither party will dismantle either our military or the welfare state. Taxes are not going to fluctuate more than +/- 5%. Nobody is going to dismantle Obamacare. Abortion is here to stay, legalization of same sex marriage is inevitable, etc. And I think these are all good things and I have no pressing incentive to vote to change the status quo.

I understand that other people don't have the same views and want to see fundamental change. But I think most people really don't want fundamental change. They maybe want to move the needle a bit one way or another, but they're basically okay with how things have evolved to be.

There was a great graphic on reddit the other day showing voter preferences by party. There is little difference between peoples' priorities with the exception of the military. Everyone cares about jobs and social security. Nobody cares about the environment or infrastructure. I find it difficult to look at the US and think anything other than that it closely reflects what your typical voter wants, or at least represents the inevitable compromise between what subsets of typical voters want.

That's not really true at all, is it? Read Reihan Salam's piece in Slate about conservative objections to the ACA. The ACA didn't pass because it was close enough to conservatively acceptable to limp through as a "moderate" reform. Conservatives hate the ACA and see it as a radical reorientation of entitlement spending back to big-budget redistributive federal spending.

So Obama and Pelosi got lucky (thank god) and got a guaranteed issue health reform bill passed. That was a huge change, and it just happened a few years ago.

Bush and Hastert could have gotten lucky transforming social security into a giant subsidized IRA scheme --- which was their stated goal. The social safety net could have been radically transformed into a government block grant to New York financial firms.

Not to mention: the whole disastrous Iraq war.

I think you should probably vote.

The affordable care act barely got out of the Senate with only 60 of the 60 needed votes to stop debate. Al Franken won his election to the Senate by 317 votes.

> As someone who doesn't vote, let me explain why. It's not because I'm cynical. It's because I'm fine with whoever wins. Both parties are pretty close to each other on the issues I care about.

And don't forget that it's comically unlikely that the chance of your vote affecting the outcome of an election (especially a presidential election) is worth the difference in value to you between potential election outcomes.

That's not it. It's unlikely that my individual actions are going to destroy the environment, but I don't litter or run the water while brushing my teeth, because it's important that people as a collective not do those things. With politics, I don't vote not because I doubt that collectively we could have an impact, but because I'm quite happy with the trajectory of things as it is.

I should add that your explanation for why you don't vote doesn't seem compatible with your explanation of why you don't litter. Don't you think that if people collectively didn't vote because they are happy with any likely result, those likely results would get pretty bad? Without my addition (regarding the small chance of your vote impacting the election), it seems like you should (according to your reasoning) still do a lot of research to find the better option and then vote for it, even if the difference between options is very small, because if people collectively did no research and didn't vote, the results would presumably be bad.

I negatively affect the environment simply by existing, and routinely do so to increase my comfort level far above what is "necessary" to survive and even far above the average comfort level of humans. I also tend to refrain from littering and water wasting, and I believe that it is important for people to collectively to likewise refrain, but it is irrational to say that the former is a consequence of the latter, since I only have control over my own actions.

There are many places where some of the things you're assuming are a given - abortion remaining legal, obamacare remaining the law - are most certainly not a given. Perhaps in your county/district/state that you have a single vote influence on they are given (I assume you live in a more progressive area), but the state I grew up in recently had a close vote on making abortion completely illegal.

Yes, that would go against the US Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision from decades ago.

No, the sponsor of the vote - nor the governor of the state - didn't mind that the legal cost in fighting a decades old SCOTUS decision would be huge. And these supporters are conservatives who are supposedly fans of smaller government... Except when more government would benefit them (also see out of control military spending).

So although perhaps your district will continue to support the items you mention, do NOT assume this is true everywhere in the US. There are concerted efforts to go backwards on many things you mentioned, so it is very important for people there to get out and vote.

Didn't the Bush vs Gore election prove this tragically wrong? Each vote counts. Outcomes _are_ different. I thought this was a hard learned lesson for our generation.

I'm not a US citizen, though.

What about Supreme Court justices? The impact of an individual appointment is only getting larger: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol29_No3_Cala.... And when you compare the justices Bush appointed to those that Obama did, you can't claim to me that both parties are the same.

Please vote, if only to help shape SCOTUS. :)

>I don't know how you break the cycle of cynicism and instill some civic responsibility in the average Joe

You can't.

>There's never going to be some external savior who swoops in from the outside and magically makes things less corrupt

That doesn't mean people aren't going to keep clinging to that joke of a hope.

Look at Google Fiber! It's people getting excited that one huge corporation is going to save them from the other massive corporations. We read articles about how the tech giants are going to save us from the NSA (oh the hilarity of Google and Facebook being on that list). We all love Tesla because we cling to a hope Elon will save us from dealerships and "Big Auto". Lots of people buy organic in the hope it will save us from "Big Agro" and be healthier. We like reading about battery and alternative energy companies because it's gonna save us from "Big Oil". We like reading about the miracle cancer cure that "Big Pharma" has allegedly chosen to ignore for evil reasons.

All of our media outlets have realized this trend and shifted to printing puff pieces about our favorite "saviors". At this point the average American has zero hope for real citizen motivated change, so we'll keep hoping for a savior that's never going to come right up until the second this ship crashes into the iceberg.