Thank you, Joseph, for an excellent analysis.  I wanted to vote more than once for this. Your essay was cogent and concise. Allow me to suggest that if you bolster this with polls from Gallup and others, it would be great for JARS, Reason, or Cato.  

It is fundamentally challenging to reconcile political involvement with selfishness. That is why many Objectivists and libertarians do not vote, join the LP or GOP, or (for that matter) run for office.  It is always action at a distance. I look to the inverse-square law: the farther you are from something, the less you know - and the less you control - by the square of the distance.  

I vote. I always vote locally. Several times in quadrennials I left the President and Governor unvoted. My vote does not count for much. At the precinct level, it counts for more. However, it is still e pluribus unum: just one out of many...

Thanks Steve and Michael.

I read an analysis of this topic that hit some of your points.  As Michael pointed out, the practicality effect of voting is near zero.  Your vote basically doesn't matter in terms of deciding the winner.  But your vote does have one significant effect.  It can make you feel like a good/moral person.  That not only drives people to vote (I'm doing my duty!), but it drives their choices (I want to help the environment, unlike those other selfish bastards who love to drink polluted water!).  The analysis suggested that people vote against their own interests (either real or perceived) because there's no real cost (their vote doesn't matter), but they can gain the feeling of moral smugness.  And an Objectivist might add that the fact that they are voting against their own interests gives them even more moral smugness because of the sacrifice.  And of course, no actual sacrifice is necessary in order to achieve this feeling of superiority.  The mere fact that you are claiming to want to sacrifice for the stated goal is enough to claim moral superiority.

Steve, the emotional high from "your team" winning is another powerful motivator, so thanks for pointing that out.  Much of the reason people support positions or candidates is because it shows support for their team.  And that leads to all kinds of irrationality.  Unfortunately, I've witnessed this among Objectivists and libertarians as well.

Not that it's a criticism on the main point of your article, but I don't think the Right doesn't want less wealth redistribution, they just want the money to go towards the military instead of the poor.

Not that it really matters who gets elected from the two choices the powers that be give us, either choice results in the same.

The dupe is they convince the public that they are legitimate and performing the publics will since "we" voted for them, even though we were given a false choice.

I'd like to see what would happen if we had preference/rank voting instead.  But even then I would still expect the powers that be to use the media to front run their choices, and for the unthinking masses to latch on to their political pop stars rather than choose candidates based on reasoned philosophy.