You shouldn't expect voting to yield good decisions even if voters are individually rational [1], which they mostly aren't [2]. However, voting does have a big

You shouldn't expect voting to yield good decisions even if voters are individually rational [1], which they mostly aren't [2]. However, voting does have a big civil rights benefit: it lets minority groups protect themselves from the tyranny of the majority in cases where they have a strong preference one way (e.g. because their rights are being blatantly violated) and the majority has a weak preference the other way. A few percentage points one way or another can swing elections, so a sufficiently pissed-off minority can have surprising political power on the margin. [1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter