Usually, when I hear of someone stressing the importance of voting for voting’s sake, it is a Democrat urging someone they assume shares their values not to stay home, but to keep someone else out of office. If you respond by telling them that you’re gonna vote third party, they get pissy with you for throwing your vote away. Not everyone does this, but most people who consider themselves politically astute do.

Changing the fact set forth in my first sentence will not happen by voting R or D.

Elected representatives, particularly at the federal level, owe their success to campaign contributions and rarely make moves designed to assist the voters who put them there. Those democratic processes mimic a democracy, but the Founders wanted concrete limits on government power. Two hundred plus years later many of those limits have been watered down or bypassed completely. It is the citizenry’s apathy and ignorance that has permitted this bastardization of the Republic and it is the citizens’ responsibility to correct it.

Many of the Founders, George Washington in particular, despised political parties and often warned of their pernicious influence. We would be collectively wise to water down the two major parties by voting for alternatives, but I’m surely not holding my breath for that day to come.

The United States is a constitutional republic not a democracy.

I live in a state that reliably casts its votes for one particular party, so their presidential candidate of choice will get all the electoral college points. Same one-party bent for state and local elections. When the system is overhauled and the president is elected by popular vote instead of the dysfunctional electoral college that marginalizes half the country I’ll consider voting again.

The last place I need to be told to get out and vote is a sports site, especially by a professional athlete that must be torn by the two choices for president: Go with the (half) black guy because he’s slightly more moderate, or with the white guy because he plainly intends to favor rich people? Tough choice, Kobe, even though Democrats and Republicans are really nothing more than opposite sides of the same coin. Me? I lean Libertarian, but even that label has been tarnished by the likes of Ron Paul and Ayn Rand. Show me a candidate that tells the American people the hard, unpopular truths they need to hear and I’ll show you someone who wouldn’t last a month on the national stage.

Spot on, it makes me sick still that Big and Carrie ended up together after 6 seasons of a torturous, tumultuous affair.