It is oh-so-very important to me that other people vote, for some reason

I've long wondered why, every two years (or really whenever there's a major election), I hear and see so much emphatic "you must go vote" rhetoric. If it were more specific, "vote for this" or "don't vote for that" then I'd have thought little of it. But more often, it's been a simple a simple exhortation on the act of voting itself. I've always thought that this was absurd...

• You do not gain anything by having more people voting. If anything, you lose something because your vote counts for less.
• You'd think that people who are disinclined to vote, who lack interest and would need your chiding to motivate them, would be the same people who should not vote.
• It's none of your business what, if anything, other people voted for anyway. Trying to meddle is boorish and downright un-American.

Honestly, even after I first registered to vote, this stuff annoyed me. I deliberately abstained from voting, or from voting on certain things, because I felt ignorant. I deemed that I didn't have enough background knowledge to be making these decisions and so I opted not to make an ass out of myself, even if it was a secret ballot. A few years of seeing how zealously involved people could be while simultaneously revealing the extent of their own ignorance somewhat tempered my stance on that. I suspect, for many people, that's a natural part of, um, being an adult. Actually, I suppose it's a cycle that's repeated in some other areas as well. At first, I'm overwhelmed and paralyzed by trepidation, wary of how poorly I understand what's going on. Then I see other people unwittingly demonstrating how they're massively clueless right before they brashly assert themselves, acting with supreme confidence where I had been so timid. And it doesn't break me out of my habits at first, but over time, it wears me down.

Encouraging other people to vote, though? No personal gain, no immediately obvious reason. It can't even be for the cause of advancing a political agenda because you have no reason to expect that your interlocutors would vote along your lines. Obviously that part doesn't apply if you're talking to specific people you know and you can gauge some of their beliefs and such. If think to myself, "Timmy doesn't really want to vote, but he agrees with me on most stuff, so if I convince him to vote, it'll be more votes for the stuff I want" then at least there's a kind of potential gain. I wouldn't go for that sort of thing myself, but I could understand that others might. However, that only applies to specific, reasonably close, acquaintances. And what I've encountered more commonly is general, vocal, public exhortation. And for that, a political agenda doesn't really apply.

For probably close to a decade, my best guess was that this whole phenomenon was some combination of virtue-signalling and a meme. And maybe both of those do play a role. Both are rather more nuanced than my straightforward sentence here. Virtue-signalling could tie into a generalized notion of "civic duty" but also to notions of youth and mentoring, to community development. And saying something is a meme says nothing about why it's a meme. I do believe that some of this is because of behaviors that are replicated after observation, spreading across the population like an infection, but behaviors only do that under certain conditions, and I couldn't be sure what those conditions were. I still can't.

In the past few years, I've been revising my assessment of this topic. I don't doubt that virtue-signalling plays a role and that some of the behaviors involved are memetic. But I've come to place the bulk of the blame elsewhere. I suspect that most of the people exhorting others to vote are doing so because they earnestly believe that the people they're exhorting would vote along their own lines. They truly think, on some level, that they can encourage others to vote and that those people, who might not have bothered to vote at all, will happen to check the same boxes that they themselves intend to check.

This seems so patently silly that even though I must have first considered it many years ago, I didn't take it seriously. What changed? Well, it wasn't a single, monumental thing. It's just the accumulated weight of my observations and what they've taught me. The vote-encouragers are almost always politically entrenched in some pronounced, polarized manner. Oh, they've got their own quibbles with a given political party or movement. They've got nuance and depth. But they've also come to so strongly view the other side as so cartoonishly villainous, so egregiously evil, so obviously wrong, that they sincerely believe prospective fence-sitters see things in the same light. A kind of "Yes, perhaps Timmy doesn't see things in the way I do, and perhaps he has problems with the general atmosphere in 'A.' But 'B' is so bad that anyone could see it, and Timmy would never vote for them."

I should have noted this fallacy a long time ago and given it the proper appreciation I now think it deserves. Because I think it's very common. Wherever people get split into two camps, people in both camps will tend to believe that the uninvolved would probably mostly side with them. They extend their own distaste for the the other side into reality itself, perceiving it to be a tangible, visible miasma.

Actually, I wonder if this might just be an extension of some deeper human instinct. In the absence of contrary information, I assume that the tastes of others are similar to my own. So I think that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are delicious and Almond Joy are disgusting, and I know that there are people out there who have the exact opposite perspective, who think that Almond Joy are delicious and peanut butter cups are disgusting. But I dismiss them as deviants. And my baseline, default assumption for the general public is that they would enjoy peanut butter cups and detest coconut abominations.

Well, it's silly and wrong when I do it with candy. But it's just as silly and wrong when you do the same thing with politics.