It's not about you telling other people what to do, it's about picking someone else who will be telling people what to do. Nothing you do will change the fact t

It's not about you telling other people what to do, it's about picking someone else who will be telling people what to do. Nothing you do will change the fact that somebody will be selected; all you can do is influence the choice. Unless all candidates are (by your evaluation) of equal merit, voting for the one you prefer is (disregarding any costs of participation) pretty much by definition going to influence how much utility you get. And, unless you assign nonlinear utility (or none at all) to the experiences of other people, the number of people impacted is obviously going to be, in the limit, linearly proportional to the utility payoff. Gratuitous example: Political Candidate X runs on a platform that he will indefinitely imprison and torture 0.1% of the population, but only people that you personally have never (and will never meet). His opponent, Candidate Y, runs on a platform of doing absolutely nothing in office. How does the utility of voting for Candidate Y differ depending on whether the relevant population is a thousand people, or ten million?