Well, I'm not so sure. Better not vote than vote awful. To me the talk about "exercise their right, privilege, and responsibility as citizens to vote" is a faint echo of the strange sentimental self-image of the U.S. consisting of "shining city on the hill", "beacon", and "last hope for the world". The Myth of Exceptionalism is always at work when the U.S. sees reasons to engage as well as when she sheds responsibility when collateral damages accrue.

I have been a staunch non-voter for the past 40 years, for various reasons. And when pressed with the remark to consider all those people who died for "our privilege to vote" I usually replied that it was democracy that brought Hitler to power not a coup. (In fact it was some kind of coup as the backroom deals between Schleicher, Brüning, Papen, and Hindenburg to make Hitler Reich Chancellor to tame him inside a broad coaltion of conservatives pretty quickly backfied.) I had only one rule: Should voter turnout sink below 51% I'd vote, not for the programs of the parties but to keep the democratic system alive. (I always accepted that I could afford my stance of not-voting only because there was a majority of people actually voting.) Only lately did my assessment change when I began to view democratic systems (!) in terms of political infrastructure. (That is: Liberal democracies as a means to provide enough time for disagreements in opinion to be resolved or decdied without society breaking apart, quite contrary to what quthoritarian structures provide.)

Thus I am less into a "sentimental and moralizing approach" towards democracy but into more mundane aspects of cost-benefit considerations. (I wonder how Thomas Hardy would have seen these two approaches.)