> 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.
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.