I agree with everything you said 100%, except the bit about how if voting worked it'd be illegal. Republicans are literally trying to make it that way. One of their main goals is to disenfranchise as many poor people and minorities as possible, bc if everyone voted, republicans would lose every election by a landslide. That's why they love things like manually registering to vote, randomly deregistering people, the electoral college, and hand counting ballots, while opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, automatic voter registration, RCV, basically anything that gives Americans more voting power. Voting is very much the least you can do to affect change in America, but it is still a thing you can and should do regularly before republicans abolish it