voting is absolutely worth the squeeze when you do it. however voting also is heavily dependent on a voting base that is both highly engaged in the process and is knowledgeable about the issues.

so when you have elections where:

1. a third or more of all eligible voters do not vote
2. laws have been passed to make it harder to vote for some people
3. a majority of the people who do vote have only paid attention to campaign issues for at the most the two weeks directly before the end of voting and
4. voters are not given the facts about each candidate by a press that is more interested in manufacturing a close race for pure financial gain rather than accuracy in telling the truth about the candidates

voting completely defeats the purpose. because the end result is not one based on actual facts, it's an outcome manufactured by vested interests with near infinite resources given the petina of legitimacy by playing on the fact that people were freely given a choice. more times than not there's enough people who are paying attention to overcome that deficit in the ability to message. but the times when it does not it goes really wrong.