All of us living in a 'democracy' have the right (or duty) to give our vote every few years. And for most of us this is the main interaction with the system of governance, apart form obviously being forced to comply with their rules and pay taxes.

Voting is celebrated as an important and meaningful ritual and we hear that everyone aught to vote, otherwise the country would descend into dictatorship. But how important is an individual vote actually.

Measuring this is difficult. Mathematically most votes are exactly worthless and only few votes break the balance and are relevant. But this is not a useful analysis as at the moment of voting this is unknown and unpredictable. The best measure would be the open market price if buying and selling votes were legal. But it is not. And due to the distributed supply and low value there is no flourishing black market and actual prices for sold votes are very hard to find.

Value for sellers

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But there are some indicators that let us estimate the value of a vote. We have an increasing fraction of people no longer caring to vote. Some of those, like me, do it for ideological reasons, but most because they value their vote less than the effort to cast it. Let's say it takes about one hour of time to vote, valued at roughly 10$, then these people believe that a vote is worth less than 10$.

I think this very much reflects the perception of many people. There is the fraction that thinks that voting is sacred and that would never sell their vote. But I am quite convinced that most people will happily sell their vote for 100$, likely for much less.

Value for buyers

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There is also a way to estimate the price buyers would be willing to pay. We know the biggest buyer are the political parties and while they cannot directly buy, we can see how much they spend on advertisement, which is a passive buying of votes. And the prices per vote are between 5 - 10 $. Now we know that a large fraction of votes are by loyal voters and adds specifically target swing votes. So let's increase that number to no more than 100$ a vote.

This estimate is quite generous, plus when buying would be legal the supply would rise and a realistic price should be well below 100$.

Less than 20$ a year

So we can quite safely conclude that the value of a vote is below 100$. And since we can only elect every few years, we can say that our voting has an annual impact of about 20$. This is how much we economically affect governance.
It is a real impact that already includes that all parties are essentially the same. However, for the voter this impact is hard to predict because parties often flip-flop on their official stance, while special interest groups can rely much more on consistent political support.

Instead you can have a much more predictable and direct impact by spending two hours a year working in a local charity of your choice. Or by donating 20$ a year to any charity. And likely the value of a vote is more like 10$ than 100$ and you already break even at 2$ donations a year, or 2 seconds of charitable work a day.

So why all this hype around voting if it has such a low impact? If instead of going to vote you reserve that time to help others, that would already be better. The voting hysteria is not explainable by voting being very important. And if it was then people would happily go voting. The masses are not that stupid, the simply sense that politics is a scam and participating is not worth it.

Voting in reality is a ritual to claim authority. And therefore it is crucial for our masters that we all participate so they can demonstrate their claim to power and explain why they should be able to tell us what to do. If you are really about changing the world, forget about vote and do something useful instead.