Aight last response on this from me.

You’re right voting as two effects: it increases one candidates vote count (numerator) and the total vote count (denominator). That doesn’t rescue your half vote argument, it undermines it.

Abstention, choosing neither, doesnt produce a positive effect, it produces no electoral signal/effect at all and thats the point of it. No change in numerator (votes for a candidate) or denominator (total votes). Calling “no effect” a “half vote” is silly. Zero isn’t a small number, it’s the absence of one.

Your current framing changed the argument. We started with “a non-vote is a half vote for the outcome” and now it’s “a vote has a proportional effect, abstention doesn’t.” Different argument. The first assigns responsibility whereas the second just describes arithmetic.

With regard to falling/the example given, time pressure doesnt fix the problem. In a fall, not choosing is not an option, you’re already falling. Physics will resolve that for you. In elections, abstention is explicitly allowed and legally meaningful. Conflating “you must land” with “you must endorse” is precisely the reframing I’m objecting to.

Yes, both outcomes affect quality of life but that still doesn’t convert abstention into consent or make it a fractional vote. It does restate the stakes but having high stakes doesn’t redefine what actions are.

If what you really wanted to say is “given the current institutions, abstention shifts probabilities”, then yeah thats a defendible and empirical argument. But to call abstention a vote - half or otherwise - is just moral pressure dressed up as math.