> I can't believe that you don't think voting is important! How will you ever take ownership of your own country if you don't take advantage of this privelege?
> Just so you know, if you don't vote (and are able to) you better not be complaining about how the country is being run!!! You don't have any right to complain!

First of all, I always have a right to complain. It's right there, in the Constitution, at the very beginning of the amendments: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Notice how it says nothing about having to vote in order to take advantage of my rights to free speech or to petition my government?

Voting is a weird thing. I do believe it's important, but only on a large scale. Darien pointed out why: my own individual vote is meaningless. Where I live, even close local elections are decided by thousands of votes. State and federal elections are usually won by millions of votes.

What I said in my original post to wintermute is that voting is basically a net loss for the voter. What you gain by voting is miniscule, an incredibly small fraction of a decision, is offset by significant losses of your time. Not only do you have to register and stay registered whenever you move, you have to put in a lot of time to actually research all the issues. In California I'm asked to vote on 20 or more items in a given election (and we have at least two elections every two years -- though lately we have had an election every year since 2002).

Every two years I am expected to vote for: my federal representative, a state assemblyman, city councilmen, hospital board members, local ballot initiatives, state ballot initiatives, judges, members of water boards, and probably other stuff I cannot remember. Staggered among those elections are elections for state senators, federal senators, presidents, governors and the entire state cabinet (secretary of state, treasurer, vice governor, even insurance commissioner). And when we have ballot initiatives we really have them. In 2004 there were something like a dozen initiatives in the general election. We'll have two on the primary ballot in June, seven are qualified for November, seven more are pending signature verification (meaning they could make it in November) and seven others are collecting signatures.

I consider myself fairly well informed but there's no way I have the time or interest to actually understand all of these issues. If I were to exercise my civic duty to vote it would be almost a fulltime job just keeping track of what the heck I was voting for!

And what would I get for all my hassle (of course one must also spend some time actually voting)? Almost nothing. From an economic standpoint, voting makes no sense. You invest time that has a real value to get something that has no value. It's a bad deal. The most that you actually get is a feeling that you did something you were supposed to; you get to take pride that you did your duty.

The weird thing is, if nobody voted it would be a disaster. From my perspective, though, people do vote, and once again my individual actions on the issue don't make a difference one way or the other. This means I can sit back and take a free ride on their efforts.

Ste "I actually do vote, though not on a lot of issues and not in every single election. Even I'm sometimes a sucker for that good feeling" phen