[anigbrowl]

By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.

This is only true in the context of a single election. Over multiple election cycles, small movements in voting patterns can announce the start of a trend. Saying your vote doesn't count is an abdication of responsibility - 'somebody ought to do something about it, but 'they' would never allow it, hurf durf.'

[celoyd]

As I said, empirically, those announcements are not important. Look at Perot, Nader, Paul – those votes might have been half an epsilon further from wasted than a vote for Obama or McCain, but they were still vastly less effective than any of a dozen other political actions using equal time and effort. And your importance to any trend is inversely proportional to its importance.

As prodigal_erik points out in a sibling comment, this is a systemic problem with our electoral system. It has nothing to do with hurf durf.

Seriously, saying the median American’s vote doesn’t count is a statistically founded observation, not an ethical action. In terms of ethical actions, I’m advocating for the opposite of laziness-posing-as-cynicism. I want a kind of intellectual vigor about politics where we care enough to spend our resources where they’ll do the most good. We should care about school boards and our own jobs, not the essentially symbolic presidential vote.

Voting is like buying a spatula with a pink handle. Refusing to work with a company that donates to an irresponsible county commissioner is like convincing a bright student to work in cancer research. It’s way less cool and way more important.

The best way out of this is the (virtual) abolition of the Electoral College or the adoption of true electoral reform. These are more realistic goals than they might seem.

[prodigal_erik]

In our winner-take-all system, the natural constituency for a third party would have to be willing to withdraw their support from the less unfavorable major party candidates, and give elections over to the other side's nutjobs. That's a very high cost just to communicate a trend to politicians, which could have been done by straw poll without the resulting damage to civil rights, the economy, church-centric values, or whatever you're most concerned about. The cure for tactical voting is some other polling system like IRV or approval, where I don't lose all possible effect on outcome just because my favorite doesn't win.