That's a fairly simple one. If all you value is the benefits to you of your influence on the election, do not bother to vote (and especially don't bother spending the resources required to educate yourselves so as to vote responsibly). It's very clearly not worth it except perhaps for the smallest local elections or closest large elections.

If you value other things related to voting, like feeling as if you've done your civic duty, or feeling like a member of a group (like a political party), then by all means vote if the hassle of physically voting is less than that benefit.

This seems like a pretty clear description of rational behavior, and if you expect people to behave largely rationally, this description seems to explain some of the problems often attributed to elections, like low voter participation and low voter knowledge of the candidates and issues.

But then if people only care about the benefits to them, then they'll be overtaken by "lizards" who exploit them but never get voted out because no one thinks voting passes a CBA. Populations who vote "despite" its wastefulness systematically win against those who don't.

Arguably, the only reason any population isn't overrun by lizards is because it's people are mostly "wasteful" in this sense.

One intermediate solution is to force everyone to vote so that it's no longer costly. This is arguably what is accomplished when people promote voting out of civic duty, etc.

But I don't think people are wasteful in that sense. Voter participation and voter awareness tends to be low, at least in the USA. Besides, if your government only works if people act in a specific irrational manner, I don't have high hopes for it, especially considering that one usually cited fundamental role of government is to fix problems where individual rationality does not lead to group rationality.

Forcing people to vote doesn't incentivize people to educate themselves on the issues, which is required to "vote responsibly" according to the usual Western civics class description of how democracy is supposed to work.

Voter participation is very high, and voter decisions very wise, relative to the lizard scenario; and it's not clear that "not being overlorded by lizards" is a kind of irrationality.

Remember, the lizard scenario is something like "500 lizards outvote 300 million and put in 99% tax rates on non-lizards, to be spent entirely on lizards, all because none of the 300 million want to vote, reasoning that their vote doesn't affect the outcome."

Mandatory voting would definitely be an improvement over that for much the same reasons I gave before.

>On the one hand, why bother voting? It's a pain in the ass and my single vote has such a negligible effect. On the other hand, if everyone like me has that same attitude, then I and others like me lose our voice in the election. So should I vote, or not?

There are going to be final poll numbers. Do you prefer that they be an accurate statistical sampling of the population, or a biased one (perhaps biased towards whatever causes some people to vote and others not to)? Your decision on whether to vote, and whether to encourage others to vote, and which others to encourage to vote, is determined by this preference.

There are a couple of simple Nash Equilibria here, as well. Assuming you want your ideology to win the election, you want everyone who agrees with you to vote, and everyone who disagrees with you to stay home. Therefore, you engage in vote suppression against your political enemies and vote recruitment for your political allies. The Equilibria are:

* Negative Nash equilibrium: the piling-up of voter suppression activities of all types causes election outcomes to be determined entirely by who's better at keeping their enemies from voting. Since this is a zero-sum game played against the enemy team's vote recruitment efforts, all teams should notice they've been sucked into a zero-sum, zero-net-productivity black hole, and pass regulations against the worst forms of vote suppression (such as mislabeling polling places or election dates, removing "enemy" demographic groups from the voting rolls, etc.).

* Positive Nash equilibrium: everyone spends lots of effort on vote recruitment efforts, and the actual election outcomes are thus a very accurate statistical sampling of real population preferences.

* Genuinely dangerous and subversive Nash equilibrium: some limited number of political parties consolidate power and trade it back-and-forth, either allowing each-other to win elections or drawing elections laws/boundaries so as to ensure each of them can confidently plan their next round of office-holding. Elections become play-acts of real political contest, and the population's real preferences are increasingly ignored.

You decide which of these we see in different actual democracies right now.