I have to agree with Squeegee Beckenheim here, as I have on record on this forum more than once speaking up against the "my vote doesn't make a difference, so I won't bother" approach.
This is true only if you take the rather strict position that the 'outcome' of the election is purely who won, and no other information is pertinent or valuable.
My view is that, on the contrary, all the information is important. Not only who won, who who didn't - a minor candidate who gets a respectable share of the vote can bolster a position in other, future elections. A major candidate who wins by a large majority is a different outcome to one who just squeaks through. A large majority may fuel a more robust campaign from opposition parties in the future, it may make them give up, but it's not irrelevant. All this is rather negated if large amounts of people don't bother to vote.
"I'm not going to vote, because my chosen candidate never wins" seems to me like classic circular reasoning. Get out there and vote. They may not win this time, they may not win next time, they may never win. But they're definitely not going to win if you never vote for them. This becomes all the more important in PR elections, where the overall result can vary quite a lot from the headline 'first' vote results.
The outcome of an election is not 'who won'. It's a much richer, wider, more nuanced picture made up of all sorts of quantitative and qualitative information.
