The Value of Voting (zero)

I know a handful of people who are political partisans, that is, they're really "into" political parties like the republicans or democrats. Thankfully, these groups represent small minorities now. Only about 27% of the population "identifies" as a democrat, and about 27% identify as a republican. That ~20% number is a consistent value across many disparate scenarios. I would guess about 20% of the population gets COVID shots now, for example. Indeed:

As of early 2026, about 17.5% of adults reported having received the 2025-26 COVID-19 vaccine, which includes booster doses.

The 20% number is evidence of some phenomenon that follows a power law. These are all examples of what I would call an "erosion of belief" scenario. COVID offers a great recent example. Initially there's a lie: "COVID will kill you if you don't get an untested, ineffective concoction from pharmaceutical companies." The lie is sold via the herd behavior of the populace. However, over time one-by-one people exit the herd as their personal experience contradicts the narrative pushed by self-interested salespeople like Fauci. For some reason though about 20% of the people continue to insist the herd opinion was correct.

The herd formation mechanism is easy to understand. Humans seem to have some "voting" mechanism in their brain just like ducks or chickens or cows. When confronted with an unknown situation, humans will decide what to do based on observation of other people in an ongoing informal "vote". Our flock of ducks does the same thing all day, everyday. They decide what to do as a group, especially what's "dangerous" or safe.

Imagine a scenario with 20 people caught in a rain storm who could take shelter in a cave or a spooky dilapidated cabin. The process by which the group "decides" the spooky scenario is safe is essentially a vote. The way the situation really unfolds is the "braves" or "independents" or "risk takers" actually decide what to do by going into the cave, then the others follow along once it's proven safe via a sort of "vote" that's quite similar to the duck's voting mechanism. The followers memory performs an "experience laundering" and they convert their following into a "decision"; this would correspond to the one-by-one reassessment of the COVID lie... okay, so what about the remnant 20%?

The remnant 20% seems to be stuck in what's essentially an imaginary voting loop. That is, they formed their opinion as a member of the herd. The herd moved on, they didn't notice. This seems to be the case for political partisans. During an election cycle, the herd gets convinced to vote for dirtbag "A" or "B". The election ends, ditbag "A" doesn't do anything promised or discussed in the election cycle. One by one, the herd understands that, except the remnant.

Anyway, an obvious conclusion is the value of the vote is zero. The only thing that matters is real information and an ability to evaluate it. The voting mechanism comes about because the common scenario is lack of info, and inability to evaluate it in adequate time. This scenario is rare/never happens for humans in the modern world, however, our ancestors lived in that world all the time for millions/billions of years so people "feel" like that's the ongoing situation.