system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I think it does not matter if I vote in an election or not. CMV

People say that every vote counts. I think that mine does not. I have never witnessed an actual election in which one party would end up off by one vote.

Of course, the results of an election are just a sum of single votes like mine, but consider this proposition:

1. Whether I decide to vote or not, it will not change anyone else's decision in the election (let's assume I don't tell anyone).
2. There's virtually no chance that an election ends up in a tie (or off by one vote).
3. Therefore, my decision to vote or not does not matter.

I could never find any reasonable counter-argument to this.

(I am not a native english speaker, so excuse my mistakes.)
gpt
The place your vote literally matters is not in national elections, it's in state propositions and local elections, which really, is how it should be. There's no reason why your opinion should have any statistical effect on the governance of an entire country.

That said, this is basically an example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It is always in your "rational" personal best interest to "defect" and fail to vote, but if a significant majority do this, then the country is run by fanatics, which is a much worse outcome than if everyone cooperated. 

The conundrum of the Prisoner's Dilemma is basically that there's a huge societal cost to people acting in their own rational self interest, and that ultimately this results in negative *personal* consequences for each individual compared to behaving in a cooperative manner.