From a game theoretic perspective, it’s hard to justify voting at all unless the population of voters is very small. The argument is familiar; if one hundred million people vote between murdering babies and murdering veterans, my vote has essentially no impact. If I value staying home at all, doing so strictly dominates voting for my preferred choice. This is better than a Nash equilibrium: absent other benefits to voting besides your side winning, there is simply no reason at all to vote.
If no one running for a major election is appealing, I can’t see why not voting is considered so terrible. (Unless it matters to you who’s sheriff.)
For the nth time, it is virtually never the case that the ballot has only one race on it. Surely you can find someone unobjectionable, or at the very least write in some name.
Why should one “bother” to vote if the election is already determined elsewhere without ones vote?
An old farmer gave me this advice as a kid. He said I would go and vote for the republican but my wife would vote for the democrat so what’s the point in voting.
Well, it’s like I said—if you care who’s sheriff, knock yourself out. But last November there were about a bazillion different races for offices whose occupants make very little difference in my life. The only elections I had time to be informed about were for president, senator, and governor; if I found all major candidates distasteful then coming in just to write in a vote would have been a silly thing to do just for cred.
(ftr, I did vote. If I knew then what I do now I may not have.)