The current U.S. election is a mess. There’s really no other way to put it. Voters are extremely dissatisfied with the two major party candidates, and every week there seems to be a new scandal or outrageous sound bite. Consequently, interest in third parties has reached all-time highs. As someone who plans on voting for a third party candidate in November, I was extremely dismayed to read an article recently published by Professor Clay Shirky that dismissed voting for a third party candidate as “voting your ego” and a waste. Such a view is not only demonstrably wrong, but also illustrative of the views held by many mainstream political commentators who believe third parties are irrelevant to the U.S. political process. My personal conversations with Trump and Clinton supporters over the past year have confirmed for me the primary problem of the U.S. electoral system: people tend to vote for the ‘lesser of two evils.’ In other words, people don’t necessarily like the candidate they vote for, but they hate the other guy more. Trump supporters tell me how bad Clinton is. Clinton supporters tell me how bad Trump is. Neither group spends much time promoting their own candidates’ positives. This is partially because negative advertising is more effective and partially because neither candidate is particularly good. As Shirky himself noted, “it’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work that way.” Indeed, it is. Unfortunately, he later passively defends it by saying, “but that’s how our Presidential elections are set up.”If taken at face value, saying ‘but that’s just how it works’ concedes that the system will never change, ever. Boycotts, voting for third parties, protest movements, and voting abstention are all just naïve attempts to change a flawed system that is immutable. Never mind the work of suffragists who waged a battle lasting 72 years before women got the right to vote nationally. Never mind the century of boycotts, political lobbying, and bloodshed it took for people of color to gain their civil rights. Never mind the coalition of Free Soil Democrats and former Whigs who upended the political establishment of their day by forming the anti-slavery Republican Party. According to supporters of the two party duopoly, the U.S. electoral system, the bedrock of the republic, is deeply flawed, but there is simply nothing we can do. What an incredibly short-sighted and defeatist attitude. If the possibility of political change can be brushed off so easily and carelessly by Shirky and other commentators who share his views, then Trump’s xenophobia and Clinton’s email scandals are the least of America’s problems. Those who claim that third parties are irrelevant point to how the U.S. system encourages coalitions which represent broad swaths of the electorate. In order to win elections in this setup, candidates and their respective parties cannot be too ideologically pure, lest they alienate centrist voters. As Shirky notes, “this forces the citizens themselves to get involved in the disappointing tradeoffs” that are inevitable when governing. In other words, voters cannot get everything they want out of a candidate. Sometimes people will have to vote for candidates that don’t share the exact same views as them. Compromise is indeed a necessary part of democracy and I will not deny the many merits of this coalition system. The problem is, especially over the past few years, the system has not worked how its proponents say it should.There’s a big difference between compromising by voting for someone you occasionally disagree with and being forced to pick a candidate whom you hardly agree with at all. Unfortunately, many voters are currently stuck with the latter situation. The number of voters who identify solidly with one of the two main parties is at a record low, yet citizens are still presented with only those two options. It’s difficult to say that the Republican or Democratic parties are true coalitions anymore with political polarization at its highest level in decades. This year, Republicans chose an egotistical, nativist loudmouth who appeals to some of the worst elements of the far-right, largely ignoring moderate conservatives. Democrats, on the other hand, chose a hawkish career politician whose own biographer admits that she “has had a difficult relationship with the truth,” largely ignoring environmentalists, anti-war liberals, and Sanders supporters. It’s no wonder so many feel as though they have no place to go.Of course at the end of the day, you can vote for whomever you want. If you think Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton represent your views well, then by all means vote for one of them. But if you choose to opt for the Republicans or Democrats solely out of this feeling of misplaced obligation to suck it up and vote for the lesser of two evils, don’t kid yourself. You’re not being the adult in the room. You’re not making the more mature or sensible choice. You’re just making the easy and convenient one. Trying to justify that choice with the claim that this particular election is just too important, a trope recycled every four years, is just a lazy way of deferring change indefinitely. History does not remember those who say to the reformers and the activists that “no one is listening;” it remembers those who inspire people to make their fate, not be resigned to it. Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Darrell Castle probably won’t win this November. But for even one of them to get 5% of the popular vote, a realistic possibility given Trump and Clinton’s low favorability ratings, would ensure public funding of their party’s next campaign. Who knows? Perhaps in 2024 or 2028 a third party could be a major contender. America’s best days may indeed be ahead of it, but only if more people start “noisily opting out,” as Professor Shirky derisively described it, of the insanity that is voting for the same two choices over and over again and expecting different results. Then maybe, just maybe, one day elections will actually be mechanisms for political change, rather than just a quadrennial exercise in futility. Only time will tell.This article was written by Ben Haller. 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