Depends on the point of view. From my point of view, in the world of open source, the mainline client/fork is the elected official, and users are the voters.
Every user or group of users can become/create an elected official by creating a fork of his/their own, and other people can vote for the official by using forked version of software.
Every user or group of users can become/create an elected official by creating a fork of his/their own, and other people can vote for the official by using forked version of software.
Saying that using or not using is equivalent to a vote is far fetched. It is not a vote.
If you are using it, then you are supporting it. You are trusting it. You are placing your trust and your life in the hands of the software you are using, the same as you do with elected officials.
And there are different choices: Litecoin is one of them. NFTF fork is also a choice (however differences between mainline fork and NFTF are practically negligible).
Sounds like a vote to me.
It is not a vote because the result of a vote is supposed to induce a decision that will concern all participants. It might sound trivial to remind this, but when Obama was elected, people who voted for Mitt Romney did not gather in a part of the USA to make a separate state.
Also, a vote is basically a question that is asked to you, and your answer is taken into account with the answers of others. When you download a software, or when you just use it, you don't have to tell anybody. People might care about you using it, and your choice might in the end support the developers in some way, but there is no accurate accounting of the number of users and it does not directly affect the decisions of developers. Really, it has very little to do with what a vote actually is. It might look like it, but it's more of a metaphor than anything else.
Sure, there are some differences, but it still is good enough for me.
Despite that, it may work even better than standard democracy.
Great quote.