[guard-of-terra]

"feel they are not entitled to their beliefs"

When there's polarization in a society where a majority of population out-vote a minority on every proposal, said minority has all motivation to withdraw from public politics and secede.

Imagine a country with 60% big-endians and 40% little-endians. Big-endians own every president, every senate and every vote they care to win. Little-endians have no sensible choice but to split into their own country where they'll be a majority, perhaps with civil war and ethnic cleansings in the process.

[angry_octet]

This situation has been engineered in many countries: the gerrymander (great etymology btw). Combined with other techniques to disenfranchise voters (making it difficult to register to vote, voter ID charades, not enforcing that employers give time to vote) it is very effective in making the minority believe it is 'pointless' for them to vote.

The first past the post system strongly encourages this sort of manipulation. If electorates were made larger and multiple candidates elected for each then this problem would disappear, but established parties would never allow that to occur.

Edit: it has become evident recently that the HN downvote system cannot cope with political discussions, as evidenced by your post being killed. I would suggest that posts with political content have up and down votes shown, rather than the sum being applied to modify visibility. As it is, the downvotes are just "I don't want you to be able to express your ideas."