Election time. It's done all wrong. When there are only 2 candidates for an office, it's fine. But there is the Green Party, Libertarians, the Natural Law Party, Independants. I think there are hundreds of people running for president of the US. But, there are only 2 (and some would argue only 1) candidates who have any fighting chance of winning the election. Now, let's assume that Clinton and Dole were running neck and neck and it was between them and all the 3rd party candidates had no chance. This may not be the case, but it is like this in the local election here for Congress. So, if you vote for a 3rd party candidate, it is truly a wasted vote. You have the opportunity to decide the election, but if you vote Libertarian, then you might as well not have voted cuz the Libertarian is not going to win. One of the reasons that the Libertarian isn't going to win is because even if half the population wanted to vote for the Libertarian candidate, most of them would realize that it would be a wasted vote and so no one would vote for him.

There is a solution for this. On the ballot, you should be able to list your 1st choice, 2nd choice, etc for any office. So then all the people who want to vote Libertarian would put there first choice as the Libertarian candidate and there 2nd choice would be maybe the Democrat or Republican or whoever. The officials would go through all the ballots, looking only at people's first choice. Let's say that the Democrat gets 45% of the vote, the Republican gets 35% and the Libertarian gets 20%. Well, the way it is now, the Democrat would win and that would be it. But, maybe all the people who voted Libertarian had the Republican as their 2nd choice. Now, they'd take this into account and add the 20% to the 35% and the Republicans would win, and deservantly so.

One of the advantages of this would be that you could vote for a third party candidate without throwing away your vote. This is pretty much how the student elections are done at UC Berkeley and they ought to do this everywhere.

In the election for Congress here in SB, there is a Democrat and a Republican. There is also an independant, a Libertarian, and others running. But they have no chance of winning. I'd like to vote for one of them, but I'm going to have to choose between the Democrat and the Republican because I know that the third party candidates have no chance of winning. Oh well.