Let’s Make A Deal

So as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not exactly thrilled about either of our major presidential candidates.

Unfortunately, the political system in the United States is strictly limited to two parties, and anyone not belonging to one of those two parties, no matter how qualified or popular they may be, has no legitimate chance of being elected.

Then I came across VotePact.org, which I thought was pretty neat.

The basic premise of Vote Pact is that a significant portion of Americans don’t really identify closely with either of the two major parties (and specifically with those parties’ candidates in this particular election), but they vote for them anyway because they fear that voting for a third party candidate just helps the party that they dislike the most.

Vote Pact’s solution:

Disenchanted Republicans should pair up with disenchanted Democrats and both vote for third party or independent candidates they more genuinely want. This way they siphon off votes by twos from each of the establishment parties. This liberates the voters to vote their actual preference from among those on the ballot, rather than to just pick the “least bad” of the two majors. They could each vote for different candidates, or they could vote for the same candidate. If the later, it could offer an enterprising candidate a path to actual electoral success.

On the website, there’s a chart to show how, statistically, this is somewhat feasible.

Of course, it’s not like all the people who don’t really like Obama or McCain are a politically uniform group, so it’s highly unlikely that they could ever unite behind a third party candidate.

But boy, I think it’d be cool if they did.