True, but you didn't pick your country of birth either—although it is possible, for some, to chose their country at a later date. Voting is only a partial choice (at best).
I know quite a few people who have never in their lives voted for the elected President - some are in their 50s and vote in every single election. Many have no other country which would let them in and better suit their desires.
That doesn't make democracy bad, but it's absolutely bizarre seeing people in these threads equate "you get to vote" with "you're voluntarily accepting your government". As you say, you don't get to pick where you're born, and the chance to vote doesn't necessarily change anything for you personally.
As an aside, your unlucky acquaintances present an intruiging statistical anomaly. Pure random chance would cause a failure rate like that about 0.1% of the time - I imagine the rate is considerably lower for real people, who by definition are more likely to vote for the winner. It's not so surprising to know one such person - 1 in 5 if you know 200 people - but you know 'quite a few', which rapidly brings it to thousands to one against. You should definitely consider putting some money on whoever they aren't voting for next election.
Unless of course they vote for third party candidates every election, in which case failure is guaranteed and voting is an entirely symbolic act.
> consider putting some money on whoever they aren't voting for
I probably should, honestly - at least if most/all of those people are voting the same way in an election. Since it's not prescience, I suspect I just don't have a good sense of the dropout rate; I learned this because 2016 was an upset, so several Clinton voters mentioned that even a seemingly-safe election had maintained their losing streak.
> I imagine the rate is considerably lower for real people, who by definition are more likely to vote for the winner.
This I'm not sure about, and it's a pretty interesting question. You're obviously right that a randomly-chosen person has a >50% chance of having voted for the winner, but I think this is a non-standard population issue.
People have a lot of different voting strategies, and presumably the people I know are some sort of 'perverse voters' - whatever forces lead >50% of people to vote for a given candidate tend to push them in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how common this is, but I expect it's probably bigger than the random rate. If somebody's "vote for the underdog" instinct hits 60%, that would ~triple the odds of getting this outcome.
> they vote for third party candidates
I didn't count anyone who consistently votes third party, since that's effectively "didn't vote" for odds of winning. But I think several of these people did vote Nader in 2000, which dodged a particularly hard-to-call election.
That doesn't make democracy bad, but it's absolutely bizarre seeing people in these threads equate "you get to vote" with "you're voluntarily accepting your government". As you say, you don't get to pick where you're born, and the chance to vote doesn't necessarily change anything for you personally.