oneiros

Does voting third party or abstaining somehow increase the count of votes for Republicans?

No, I'm only describing the spoiler effect here.

Would this be more or less irrational than actively perpetuating the problems with a party and its candidates by guaranteeing them your vote for no reason other than they're not as bad as a different party?

It would be more irrational, because if the "shoot me in the leg, I guess" party loses, everyone dies, and nobody gets to have opinions about anything ever again.

I think we can both agree that voting to avoid bad outcomes rather than to select good ones is fucked.

Of course, one has the freedom to cast their vote, or not, as they like. But I can't fathom why someone would "choose" an impossible outcome that ultimately makes the fatal scenario more likely instead of moving the needle toward the survivable one. It strikes me as irrational, which I could ignore if it were mere self-sabotage, but this affects others too.

You have misunderstood the metaphor. (edit: Rather, the people you're describing have.)

You cannot opt out. Someone will take the office.

This comment is a joke and you wouldn't want to do it like that in reality, but here are some related keywords you could look up: "Unix cat", "Unix pipeline", "grep", "output redirection", "command substitution".

one time i had a fever dream that was like, "I know how to fix this, I'll just ssh in and see what's up" :|