Is Voting Rational

Voting exhibits many traits of a public good. It is non-rival; my vote does not impede your ability to enjoy the right of voting, and I cannot exclude you from voting if you meet the appropriate qualifications. Therefore, since voting is a public good, it ought to display the trends of other public goods. Namely, that as the population increases, so does the free rider problem. As the number of people in the electorate increases, the power of any individual vote decreases. As a result, there would be less incentive in a large election to bear the cost of voting, as the likelihood of your vote deciding the election of a particular candidate or policy drops. 

But the numbers seem to tell a different story. Take the state of Virginia. In the 2024 presidential election, 72.9% of eligible voters in Virginia turned out to vote. In the following year, only 54.9% of eligible voters voted in the gubernatorial election. This does not make sense from a pure public goods framework. In the presidential election, the population of voters is vastly bigger, and so it would follow that more people would not vote and act as a free rider. However, 18% more Virginians voted in the presidential election than in the gubernatorial election the following year. Clearly there are other factors at play, but why do these other factors cause people to deviate from what the public goods framework would suggest so drastically?