If you don't have a clear preference for the Dems or the Reps, then vote for an alternative candidate (or don't vote). Don't convince yourself that you have to decide between the two major parties.

Hmmm.... Seems in the Land of the FREE you only get two political parties and both more or less believe the same thing. Not a great chice I would have thought. In my country we have proportional representation and perhaps ten to fifteen parties.

Everyone from the right wing parties to the communist parties are allowed to run in a FREE and FAIR election. I hope I never choose to be a communist as I'd no doubt be arrested in the US for being a member of a BANNED political ideology.

Don't you guys get the feeling you live in a police state. That's a little like what it looks like from Europe.

I like it, chose not to chose. When you regester to vote you have to chose wich party you want to vote for in the primarys. you can only vot for the party you check. It's a lose lose. When the primarys come around and you don't like your partys canidates you can't vote for anyone else.

What about a system built and installed in every home which lists all of the bills and legislation currently ready to be voted on....then a huge volume of emails/post are sent to those who have expressed an interest in these bills/legislation and these people VOTE for the passing or canning of the proposal.

Alternatively they could send it back to be re-written. In this way we could basically do away with politicians in one fail swoop. After all why would anyone in their right mind want just a few hundred people to make decisions for many hundreds of millions....it seems a very dangerous thing to do given human nature.

There might even be a cap of say 50,000 responses which MUST be met or the whole idea or proposal is dropped. In this way if you were delibrately trying to PUSH legislation through to satisfy some interested party or other then you'd need to convince 50,000 anonymous people which to my mind is a lot harder than delivering a brown paper envelope stuffed with cash to a handful of politicians.

Of course the people who would have to vote to adapt this are the people it would replace....and it would be unlikely they would agree.

However, A way around this is to set it up anyway, get peoples input on each and every piece of legislation and forward it to the politicians concerned. then publish what people voted for....and what the politician actually voted for. If there are repeated discrepencies this would also be published. The guilty politicians would be uncovered very quickly.

It's too bad that "instant runoff" elections aren't held. These prevent votes for minor parties from being wasted, because they re reallocated to the voter's second choice (etc.) if his first choice comes in last in the first round. Computerized voting machines finally eliminate the clerical overhead in conducting such elections. Democratic theory virtually requires this feature, to give everyone an equal voice.