The whole tree of comments is about the example of a presidential election. Do you have examples of different types of elections that you think your advice app

The whole tree of comments is about the example of a presidential election. Do you have examples of different types of elections that you think your advice applies to? In US political elections at the state and federal level, I can’t think of any. Even ballot initiatives require the voter to genuinely be informed about the possible outcomes and how the existing legislature would behave or respond in response. It would never be as simple as “I believe in policy X so therefore I should vote for it.” Do you know if policy X can hurt people if you end up being wrong about it? If the relevant legislative body can just draft a loophole to get around the ballot initiative anyway, etc? If not, your best bet often might be to abstain and allow more expert voters to decide if policy X actually is effective or not, not just whether someone happens to like it despite being generally uninformed about it. People try to map a complex bundle of issues, policies, morals, economics, etc., onto a discrete choice between specific candidates (either to elect them, or to predict their actions post-election). If we developed national policy through prediction markets or even change.org polls, then sure, you could add your highly specific opinion into the aggregate by participating in that poll. But that’s totally irrelevant to the whole tree of comments here. The trouble is that you started out by making a very extreme claim, which is that abstaining from a vote can never be an effective way to participate in an election. Now you’re trying to flip the scope of the comments or something, but still not offering any reasons why your original extreme claim about abstaining should be believed.