You do the math.

The argument against voting is that the power of each individual voter is minuscule. When weighed against the comfort of parking in front of the TV on a lazy Saturday, one vote doesn't seem to have much heft.

The polling booth looks lots less appealing than the Barcalounger.

But there is a multiplier here: the total number of voters. In democracy mathematics, quantity is quality. The more votes that are cast, the more accurately the result reflects what we want — and the more clearly our collective voice will be heard.

The "collective" is a concept that's receding in a landscape of individualism; that's evident with one look at the throngs going about their business, locked in their electronic cocoons of cell phones and MP3 players.

This picture needs to be refocused, and with tomorrow's voter-registration deadline looming, now's the time to start. If you don't register to vote by tomorrow, you forfeit the right to cast a ballot in September's primary, one that features particularly exciting races for seats in the U.S. Senate and House.

It's easy to dismiss voting as an illogical exercise — why should anyone care what one person thinks? The danger is that elections involving a shrinking segment of the population — as they do in Hawai'i — produce leaders who have little interest in the full spectrum of public interests and concerns. They figure they need only satisfy the constituents who actually vote, typically the older and more affluent among us.

The younger and poorer who don't vote are throwing away a significant degree of influence. Politicians may ignore their interests because nonvoters have given them license to do so.

American leaders, even those elected by a few, have enormous power over people elsewhere who would relish the privilege of having a say themselves. Those photos of first-time voters in Iraq remind us that many people recognize the privilege of voting, even if we have forgotten.

The old-fashioned approach was to promote voting, in schools and society, as a civic duty. The whole notion seems like a snippet of 1950s nostalgia, but if people can't grasp the "privilege" of voting, then pitching it as a "duty" might have been the right idea after all.