This article is classified "Fictional"
Some people don't see the point in voting: their democratic right to have a
say in the government. In fact, the intelligent portion of these people
abstain from voting for one reason only: they know how it works.
The voting system, namely, is called the "Electoral Lottery", and is based
on the idea that with a vote you can enter the opinion of your choice
(within reason) into a giant sweepstake. The outcome of the vote is decided
by a random choice from this sweepstake.
Knowing this, you might think when someone else also votes for the opinion
of your choice, the odds of that choice being chosen increases. This is not
so, as lotteries don't allow duplicate votes. An advanced computer system,
BIN (Ballot Identical aNnihilator), which can screen duplicate votes, has
recently replaced the older and less reliable machine, VOTE (Verifying
Ordinal Tactical Extractor) [1]. VOTE, in turn, replaced a rather tedious
process of hand exclusion, which had continually resulted a rather
undesirable outcome based on the proportion of votes people had actually
made for different candidates.
The upshot of this is that the chance that your choice reflects that of the
outcome of the vote is one in as many different choices as there are.
Effectively, as long as one person is voting for whatever you would have
voted for, you have just as much chance seeing your choice come up whether
you vote or not.
So remember, when next you think about voting, it goes straight into the
BIN.
[1] Its sister computer, RIPPER (Removal Instrument for Personally
Published Entries to Referendum), failed trials when it appeared that
each and every vote was torn to shreds indiscriminately. The
technology has since been stolen by several budding dictatorships.