Voting is not a service that the government offers its citizens. It's a system that the citizens run to select leaders from amongst themselves. If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.
I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else?
See, that's easy to say, but I don't think we really do have an impact over who our candidates are.
> I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else?
I picked people who would act in my interest, and since you didn't participate, they only care about my interests, not yours. Why should I care about your interests, when you can't be bothered to represent them as part of the process?
Edit: Your comments seem to not really reflect the scale and complexity with which the system you're talking about operates.
you threw out the CIA torture thing above
let make a not-necessarily-called-for leap, lets say you voted for Obama
did telling Obama that he did enough to earn your vote help or hurt those affected by CIA torture?
(if you're not an Obama voter you have my apologies)
To address this, we have to reintroduce the complexity that I had omitted in my comment: there are other people besides me and the (figurative) person I was addressing.
I think the honest answer here is that yes, the CIA staff did what people wanted, likely in violation of what the law actually was, because they saw it as their duty to undertake such tasks when the public clamored that they needed safety from a dangerous world, everything else be damned.
One of the hardest and most interesting questions about government is how do we stop ourselves from making collective bad decisions on effectively a whim in a moment of weakness/fear/etc?
By saying you're going to vote, all a politician has to do to earn you vote is to be the lesser of two evils
By not making your participation automatic, you've raised the standard you hold politicians to
Don't forget all the people that voted for the opposition that lost. What do you tell them? "Too bad you didn't get enough votes to represent your interests"? This is not a sustainable system if only a few win.
My comments don't reflect the scale and complexity of the status quo because I'm arguing from first principles. Also I believe in more localized governance a la cantons, charter cities, archologies, and so on.