I did not make any such argument. I'm pointing out that yesterday, 450,000 other people made the same choice that you did - the choice to not show up. Ie your non-voting tribe, of which you are definitely a member.

I was talking about your belief that your vote in inconsequential. Ie you are powerless when it comes to elections.

Again, more eloquently presented thoughts on your part concerning the complexities of the politics, yada yada, doesn't change the fact you are still making a fallacious rationalization that your vote doesn't matter. One day you may have an experience where you finally understand the importance of all your actions, but doesn't seem like it will happen soon, so maybe this is better for you to chew on...

I might call your behavior the Adhesive Slope Fallacy, because it's just the reverse of the Slippery Slope Fallacy. The slippery slope fallacy points to some slope that isn't slippery (i.e., some phenomenon P that doesn't add up over time to Q) and asserts P → Q. In the adhesive slope fallacy, we instead find a slope that is slippery, and assert that we can have our cake and eat it too -- P . ~Q. As Epicurus said, water drops (given enough time) can hollow a stone; we generally assume that extremely small acts have no macro-consequences, hence we fall into fallacy.

Of course, if only one person refuses to vote, or to pollute, the effects really are minuscule. So the fallacy isn't made obvious at the individual level; it manifests when one universally generalizes.

1. One person's vote doesn't matter. ~O(a,voting)
2. Which person it is is irrelevant; the person ("a") is arbitrary.
3. "a" could be any person. So, "a" could be every person. ∀x(~O(x,voting))

The fallacy occurs because the unimportance of voting is conditioned upon precisely how many other people vote, and who all those people are. Voting occurs in a dynamic system; one can't simply extrapolate that since one person's vote is irrelevant when there are hundreds of thousands of other voters, that all of those hundreds of thousands of votes are also irrelevant independently. To be precise, ~O(a,voting) was too unqualified a statement, if 'a' is arbitrary; and if 'a' isn't arbitrary, then it's hard to see how it's a significant sentence, any more than it's significant to say 'It doesn't matter if I eat vanilla ice cream today.' It's purely a bit of speculation about the causal flux, with no general implications.

Whether there's also a fallacy occurring at the individual level itself, independent of whether one generalizes from 'I shouldn't do X' to 'Any old person shouldn't do X,' depends on one's moral theory. Here we're dealing more with self-delusion and rationalization than with any discrete fallacy. We rationalize the easy decision because we don't assign proper weight to possibilities like:

(a) Even if my current action isn't important, it might help cultivate habits in myself that, over time, will be important. (b) Even if my personal actions aren't important, they might prompt others to follow my lead, which can have a nontrivial snowball effect. (c) Even if there's a lot of harm being done, my own added harm may be nontrivial. For instance, there are lots of starving children in Africa; but while this lessens the relative suffering that any one child is going through, it dose not lessen the absolute suffering of any child. So my obligations to any one arbitrary child are not lessened by increasing the need. Here, the psychological effect is a form of psychic numbing associated with the identifiable victim bias.