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.
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.
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.
Yes it is.
>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.
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.'
So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
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.
