I have to say, while I understand the passion and philosophical stance you take with this outlook, it is just deeply flawed in the wake of how our electoral system actually works.
If you feel obligated to vote due to societal norms or whatever- or maybe even a sense of civic duty as a citizen- you have a choice between two parties on the ballot who can actually become President (barring an unprecedented catastrophe like a major party candidate dying a day before election day).
It is at this point that your claim starts to become tenuous- if, and only if, you literally like and dislike the Democrat and the Republican equally, and have absolutely no preference between the two, will your vote for a third-party candidate reflect your actual preferences.
If you do prefer one candidate over the other, then your third-party vote is instead contributing to something called the
spoiler effect, a demonstrably real and seriously shitty side effect of First Past the Post (aka "Winner-Take-All") electoral systems.
Here's how it works. On policy and issue stances, third parties tend to align with one of the two candidates more, and the other one much less. Voters attracted to a third-party candidate are overwhelmingly more likely to vote for the major-party candidate that has the most in common with theirs than for the other major candidate. As a result, votes for a given third party are composed largely of voters who would have voted for a specific one of the two major party candidates on the ballot if they were the only options. But when the votes are counted, there is no proportional distribution, and the person with the
most votes wins everything, even if that doesn't represent a majority of the voting population.
The end result? Voting for the third-party candidate has the ultimate impact of helping only the major-party candidate who has
less in common with the candidate you voted for. And at this point this is obvious to both major parties. It becomes in their best interest to aid certain third parties to the detriment of their opponent. So you have
Republicans making anonymous contributions to the Green and Communist parties, and
Democrats donating to the Libertarian party, etc., when they start to do well. They know third parties have no chance of winning, so the better they do, the more it benefits their own chances.
This is
insane, and it traps us in a two-party system while making it very difficult for the will of the majority of the voting public to be accurately represented. The spoiler effect ensures that one of the two major party candidates will always win, while voters hoping to change the system by voting third party aid only the person on the ballot they have the least in common with.
Your options in the voting booth, if you want your preferences to be accurately represented but don't actually want to elect a Democrat or a Republican, are:
1) Vote strategically: align with the candidate with which you have the most in common and vote for them, hoping to ensure their victory or at least deny a victory to the candidate you dislike more
2) Turn around and go home; your preferences will be reflected in that the total number of votes cast will be lower and both candidates will have to work harder to get a win by having the most of the remaining votes.
This sucks, a lot, but it's the reality of the American voting system. And tragically, this is just the very beginning of the myriad issues with it.
This video summarizes what I talked about here and more, and it's easy to jump from there to other videos explaining what else is wrong and what needs to be done to affect any real change.
