I, unfortunately, think that would be a good thing. People don't understand just how powerless and meaningless 3rd parties are and how totally manipulated they are by the existing party structure.
I say unfortunate, because that's not ideal. In a functioning democracy, robust 2nd and 3rd tier parties should play a powerful active role in setting policy and be enabled to negotiate from strong positions and form opposition coalitions. But that's NOT the system we have and voting 3rd party will never make it into a system like that. The system we have is broken and packed with malware written in legalese. 3rd parties are extra processes that do nothing but steal system resources and help the barely functional democratic process to crash.
I think most third party voters are single-issue and understand that their vote is more of a protest than anything else. Even in a FPTP, non-ranked voting system, third parties are good for bringing niche concerns to the national discussion and their policies are sometimes co-opted by one of the larger two.
Bro what?! That is complete mental gymnastics. One of the two dominant parties attempting to block other parties is somehow a good thing for democracy? I get trying to convince people it's not worth it to vote 3rd party. But saying that one of the parties should be able to make it impossible is crazy.
They really aren't. Each state has different rules for getting on the ballot, and there isn't a lot of wiggle room on them. Most are in the form of "$x% signatures of $y criteria". For instance, 5% of the number that voted in the last gubernatorial election. Plus some paperwork and the like. Third party candidates have trouble meeting these requirements.
The only thing here is that the Democrats are claimed to be watching these efforts to ensure that other parties are following these rules. They'll be watching Republican candidates as well, but that's unlikely to have any effect.
I would love a different system, such as RCV, but this is the system we have. You can probably start a petition to create it in your state, but the process varies wildly.
When large corporations make concerted efforts to put up legal road blocks and speed bumps for people, workers, and smaller businesses, that's widely accepted as a systemic injustice leading to a consolidation of power. But when it's "your" political party doing it to smaller parties with the express aim of winning an election, it's just keeping everything fair? The only reason anybody can excuse this behavior is because it's the side they want to win.
I am ok with Republicans doing the same thing. The rule of law is important, and keeping everyone to the same standard (that of the law; I know that some states have reduced requirements for smaller parties) is in everyone's best interest.
It's not, though. The last time a third party won a presidential election was when Abraham Lincoln was elected; since then, we've had an unchanging two-party system.
The US system of elections is fundamentally broken in two ways: the existence of the electoral college, and FPTP voting. Both need to be fixed before any third party has a chance to win the presidency, and until then, third parties function primarily as poison pills to draw voters away from one of the two dominant parties without any chance of winning.
Oh, and primaries suck, too; they're largely responsible for the phenomenon of Trump, since candidates have to cater to the extremist base to have a chance of winning their party's nomination. But there's no good fix for that.
Anyway, a vote for anything other than your lesser of two evils is simply a wasted proxy vote for the person you hate the most. We have to fix how we vote in the US to have any chance of real change; this is why the person you're responding to isn't doing some wild justification - they're simply recognizing the reality of our fucked-up situation.
