Boy have I been thinking about this a lot lately. Every election, we get a huge "get out the vote" campaign basically telling people it doesn't matter if they know anything about candidates or local issues, it doesn't matter if they have any understanding of policy-making, economics, international affairs, the effects of regulation, or anything else... just vote! VOTE!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOOOOOTE!
But why?
The real answer, of course, is because almost everyone who participates in these kinds of campaigns isn't just saying "vote" in the abstract. They are implicitly telling us to vote for their preferred candidate (typically the Democrat, since these campaigns are overwhelmingly driven by celebrities and media companies).
The weird part for me though is that I can't really understand why this would actually work the way anybody thinks.
Apart from encouraging a whole bunch of ignorant people to get involved in something they don't actually understand and aren't really qualified to have strong opinions about, studies have routinely shown that the ideological split among apathetic potential voters is roughly the same as the split among active voters. If these campaigns were effective, I don't really see how the outcome of any election would meaningfully change anyway under a two-party system.
I can imagine it changing a lot if we had a Condorcet or other ranked-choice system, and definitely for the worse... But not the system we actually have.
It's all weird. And insanely annoying.