I didn't vote for Zuckerberg.
That doesn't make democracy bad, but it's absolutely bizarre seeing people in these threads equate "you get to vote" with "you're voluntarily accepting your government". As you say, you don't get to pick where you're born, and the chance to vote doesn't necessarily change anything for you personally.
Unless of course they vote for third party candidates every election, in which case failure is guaranteed and voting is an entirely symbolic act.
I probably should, honestly - at least if most/all of those people are voting the same way in an election. Since it's not prescience, I suspect I just don't have a good sense of the dropout rate; I learned this because 2016 was an upset, so several Clinton voters mentioned that even a seemingly-safe election had maintained their losing streak.
> I imagine the rate is considerably lower for real people, who by definition are more likely to vote for the winner.
This I'm not sure about, and it's a pretty interesting question. You're obviously right that a randomly-chosen person has a >50% chance of having voted for the winner, but I think this is a non-standard population issue.
People have a lot of different voting strategies, and presumably the people I know are some sort of 'perverse voters' - whatever forces lead >50% of people to vote for a given candidate tend to push them in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how common this is, but I expect it's probably bigger than the random rate. If somebody's "vote for the underdog" instinct hits 60%, that would ~triple the odds of getting this outcome.
> they vote for third party candidates
I didn't count anyone who consistently votes third party, since that's effectively "didn't vote" for odds of winning. But I think several of these people did vote Nader in 2000, which dodged a particularly hard-to-call election.
I'm honestly confused by the idea that democracy means the outcomes we get are inherently more acceptable. Democracy only opens the possibility of influencing what one government does to us. Which beats the hell out of autocracy, but doesn't actually mean people are consenting to what the state does to them. Even assuming you get to vote your preference, 49% of people are still having things done to them against their will.