If you can vote and you don't go to the polls, you vote for the winner.
abstaining is a choice yes, but it is not a choice for the eventual winner, it's a choice to not participate. think of it as a secret option on the ballot you can fill in from home.
While apathy isn't the same, here it's effects are.
When you allow yourself to fall into "apathy", you effectively allow others to decide an outcome.
Explicitly without doing anything against it. Your misleading "option" does absolutely nothing.
If you decide to abstain, everyone else's vote is now more valuable, at 33.33%. You have given your voting power to other people, it didn't just disappear. And now whatever the outcome, you are participatory in it.
In the U.S. this matters more on a state level, but it still applies.
You just restated exactly what I said
> you can't retroactively attribute abstention to the winner simply because they won
Sure you can. If you transfer your share of the vote to everyone else, you are absolutely responsible for the outcome. Being indecisive and giving other people the power to make your own decision for you is a choice. You are participatory in government whether you like it or not. And complaining about the results afterwards while throwing responsibility off yourself is, again, childish.
People don't vote because it's perfectly satisfying every time, or they expect to win every time. That's a pretty childish way to look at the democratic process. But if you believe the current president is obviously terrible and you wonder, aloud, how he came to power, revealing that you didn't vote is bound to earn you some groans.
i'm not american, i voted for a losing party in my countries election, i'm not pleased with my government, but had i not voted and the situation was the same, i would not feel any differently.
When facing the prospect of Trump there is no such excuse as "there were no good options." Yeah, dems are also evil and incompetent, but Trump takes it to an existential level. You're not abstaining, you're leaving the door wide open to the worst of humanity.
And civil war, where we're probably headed, is a much bigger nuisance than voting.