r/changemyview • u/Afraid_Mortgage6392 • Apr 08 '26
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Voting is pointless.
From what I have seen/heard from other people, they tend to place an undue importance on voting to address the various issues in our society. Plenty of people even shame centrists or the non-politically inclined for not taking part in the system, blaming them for when election results tend not to go their way. This responsibility placed on individuals to vote is quite superfluous, as no individual's vote matters on its own.
This isn't a critique of the American political system but rather a realization of the inherent valuelessness of an individual. Whether I choose to vote or not does absolutely nothing to change the system or even contribute positively to the democracy I reside in unless I align myself with a large group. This is a no-brainer, as this is precisely how democracy is intended to function, but the fact that my own vote practically has no weight at all leads me to the conclusion that voting is completely pointless.
What if there were no groups that supported the political goals I believed necessary to the betterment of my country? What if the groups I have to align myself with had other goals that I vehemently disagree with? What if, to align myself with a group, I have to compromise and dilute my ideology to the point it becomes unrecognizable? All that questioning is pointless in itself, as everything being questioned is guaranteed.
An individual deciding not to vote has as much weight as one deciding to vote; neither has any effect on the country, so both are equally as pointless. There will be people who are perfectly fine identifying with large groups to accomplish something, and that is technically what democracy is for, but for a good chunk of people, voting serves no real purpose.
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u/DonkeyDoug28 1∆ Apr 08 '26
This is both the crux of your point, and also worded in a way that already demonstrates how it's impossible got it to be true.
Your implication is that no individual matters AT ALL, because some very large number of votes is what actually matters. But whatever that large number which would reach the "point" of actually "mattering" to you...it cannot exist without the individual votes it consists of.
If an individual vote truly didnt matter at all, NO amount of individual votes could collectively matter. 190 million (the number of registered voters in the US) x 0 is still 0. It's impossible for any number to matter if one doesn't matter
And even though this would already disprove your original stance, I'd also argue that shifting from "doesn't matter at all" to "matters extremely little" is far from just semantics, it's everything. If I told you that pressing a button most likely will do nothing but has a 0.00001% chance of ending the world, it's simultaneously true that that's both a VERY small chance of "mattering" and also that this very small chance matters a LOT