Apathetic voters can use proxy. After all hardly anyone has time and will to constantly keep track of what is going on.
On top of that in Hive we have vote expiration - if you don't do any governance related voting (witnesses, proxy or proposal voting), then your old votes are canceled. It happens after a year of inactivity in that field. Here is an example of such thing happening on my account: https://hiveblocks.com/b/74815666#0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Last two virtual operations in that block are expired_account_notification (notifies when governance vote expired) and proxy_cleared (my choice of proxy account was removed, so my voting power was no longer passed through proxy to witnesses and proposals). Of course I've set proxy again as soon as I noticed, but if I was not paying attention, my voting power would remain idle.

By the way, in EOS votes decay every week. Technically it works by making new votes slightly stronger, so refreshing vote every week makes fresh vote worth more than someone else's old vote, even if stakes are the same. However they have coded it so every change in voting power refreshes the vote, so even someone else can refresh it simply by staking minuscule amount of EOS on idle account - a bug in my opinion.