I don't think you're analyzing the situation properly with respect to cost/benefit.
The effect of a single vote in a national election is vanishingly small -- so small as to have, obviously, _no_ practical value. The election will go as it goes regardless of your vote. Voting does not enable you to pick your government or your antagonists. The only way you can make a vote "count" at all is to vote for highly marginal candidates and run their tallies up to the point where someone may notice -- but even this is rather dubious.
Therefore, if you're going to vote rationally, it has to be for some other reason -- something like morals, or aesthetics, or a religious sense of community with the people. Unless you're suffering from delusions of reference, your motives are not going to be material or pragmatic, because pragmatically speaking your vote is worthless. Gore and Bush are not going to be affected by your vote -- but _you_ are.
Gordon Fitch
--------------------------
Once upon a time I voted for the moral choice of a marginal candidate. I voted for Eldridge Cleaver on the Black Panther Party ticket, and not McCarthy, McGovern, Kennedy, Humphery or Nixon--most of whom were available in the California primaries. Despite assassination, and drop-outs, Cleaver was still on the November ballot, so I voted for him again. I did feel a certain righteousness and limited solidarity, at least for a couple of weeks. Then I had to go back to fight against Nixon, instead of Humphery.
But let's go back to this idea that voting effects me and not the outcome of an election.
What effects me are the policies of the state I live under no matter who I vote for and no matter how little that vote counts. What this really amounts to, is understanding my relationship to the state and its policies. This is why I mentioned Camus.
Camus began his thesis on moral judgment from the position that the State is the embodiment of murder and not the embodiment of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
It took me a long time to understand this idea, even though it seems simple enough to grasp as an absurdity. The barrier to understanding this idea is understanding that it is not an absurd or trivial premise. In fact, it is the moral truth of the matter. Camus's premise derives from his own position and history, and these were poverty, economic depression, and industrial mass slaughter. Machiavelli arrived at closely related conclusions from experience in government, the fall of its republic, and his consequent imprisonment and exile.
Now to take on the idea that I am effected by my vote and it makes me morally culpable for the policies and actions of the government.
I am morally culpable in advance, for the actions of the state, as a consequence of birth. This culpability is like original sin. It is inescapable. So, by birth, race, gender, and history of State, I am afflicted with and effected by these conditions. Since I was born in the US, and am a white man over fifty, there is a very long list of high crimes and misdemeanors against humanity for which I am morally responsible. In fact, thanks to US history the list is so long, that like Sisyphus, I can never be redeemed no matter how long and hard I atone. Deducting say fifteen or twenty years off the top for youth and ignorance hardly seems to matter when I am still facing judgment on the remaining two hundred years.
The point is, that my relation to the state which is a priori founded on slaughter and slavery has to be defined between moral antagonists.
The people I vote for as well as those I do not vote for, but are elected none the less, do not represent my material interests, do not reflect the character of my judgments, and are not my public servants and allies. They never have been and never will be. I am forced to submit to their will, and in turn they are under no obligation to submit to mine. Instead, they are my enemies and adversaries whose primary occupation seems to be to oppress, denigrate, and exploit me and everyone I know. It never seems unreasonable when others claim worse. On the other hand, I am often suspicious of those who claim better treatment.
The argument that the US is either more or less morally reprehensible than other states, does not change my relationship to it, although it does measure my culpability for its history and present conduct. I am happy enough that I don't suffer as does most of the rest of humanity. However, I also know that pleasantness I enjoy is not due to the beneficence of the state, but to the people who fought the state in the past to make it a more tolerable one to live under.
So, given that I am morally condemned in advance, and have only to make a symbolic gesture between reprehensible adversaries who both propose to rule over me and commit as many crimes as is possible for their limited intelligence to imagine, I make my unnoticed gesture toward the one that presents the better chance of a good fight.
An account of roughly the same argument comes from `The Rebel', Albert Camus, (A. Bower trans), Penguin, 1962.
Chuck Grimes