Here are two paradoxes in voting: 1. You want your vote to count, so you vote for a candidate you think might have a chance to win, which means one of the most popular candidates. Everyone else is also voting according to that philosophy, which means that popularity itself becomes self-magnifying. It gives certain meaning to the statement, "a celebrity is a person who's well known for how well-known they are." This serves to: a) give the underdog candidates even *less* of a chance in hell, and b) magnify the problem of mere campaign funds determining how popular a candidate is..because campaign funds affect how popular a candidate is to start with, and then from there we merely magnify that value. And the funny thing is, your vote's not going to change who becomes president anyway, so you might as well vote for the candidate you like. 2. Let's say you have a republican candidate, let's call him Kodos, and a democratic candidate, let's call him Kang. The voters nearly equally like Kodos and Kang on average, but there's another, independent candidate, let's call him Ralph Nader. The problem here is that the voters who like Kang more also like Ralph Nader. Some of them vote for Nader instead, which means Kodos wins. Why is that a problem? Consider this possibility: 60% of voters want either Kang or Ralph Nader, and don't want Kodos. 40% of voters want only Kodos. The just solution? Give them Kang or Nader (obviously Kang, because he was more popular of the two.) The actual result? Kodos (because, e.g., 35% voted for Kang, and 25% voted for Nader). There is a single solution to both of these problems: ranked voting using the Condorcet system. But short of the government actually making such a major change, which they probably won't, another solution would be a website... If I understand the law correctly, a political organization is allowed to persuade people to vote in a particular way. So here's the deal. A rating system is implemented on the website; users go there and rank their candidates (this is not a government function), and after a certain deadline, maybe a day or two before the general election (this could also be done for the primary election..), the server calculates the optimal result from all the votes, and then posts the result on the website as well as e-mails it to every individual user, and the users are obligated by agreement to vote for that candidate in the actual elections. Obviously, they can't be forced to vote for that person, but it's explained to them when they sign up for it that they shouldn't vote on the website if they're not going to go through with voting for the result, because otherwise they're compromising the entire point of the website. (Also, they could be required to sign a legal agreement stating they'll vote for the resulting candidate, but that's probably a) unenforceable, since all votes are private anyway, and b) blatantly illegal somehow.) Oh yeah, this system only works if 40 millions people use it. You never know; it could catch on like tamagotchis. You could also have them agree to vote for the resulting candidate only if a certain number of other people agree too, so they don't have to do it if it doesn't matter. Only problem (and it's a serious one): whoever owns the website could lie about the results to sway the election in their favor.