[yorwba]

> If voting differently doesn't make a difference, then why vote? Is it actually a democracy if elections don't have any impact?

It's not that elections don't have an impact, they do, but you shouldn't expect that impact to manifest itself as large swings in aggregate statistics, for two reasons:

1. Those statistics measure the aggregate behavior of many individuals, most of which are not elected officials but ordinary people. Unless the government adopts a command economy and micromanages everything, they have only limited influence on what ordinary people are doing.

2. The people voting in each election are mostly the same and they're not going to suddenly vote all that differently.

If you want to know what kind of impact an election outcome had, look at things the government influences directly, where there are widely divergent opinions on what to do, and where the election coincides with a change in which opinion has majority support.