1. The average person does not vote at all. They have correctly figured out that voting is a waste of time. It's more productive to spend an hour on some other useful activity, rather than spending an hour voting.
2.  
3. Voting is a lie that's used to trick people into complacency. The argument is "If you don't like the way things are, then vote for someone else." However, the two mainstream candidates are usually both lousy. Typically, both candidates are funded by the same wealthy people and corporations. The only difference is that the candidate who is more likely to win receives a larger bribe.
4.  
5. For example, in the Presidential election of 1912, all three candidates were advocates for a banking reform bill. All three bills had nearly identical language. This banking reform bill created the Federal Reserve.
6.  
7. People who want to cause social change and improvements have their energy funneled into the wasteful activity of voting and advocating for specific candidates.
8.  
9. It's almost impossible to mobilize the 50% of people you would need to get support for a promising candidate. There are all sorts of dirty tricks that can be used. For example, Ron Paul is gaining popularity on the Internet. If he starts getting mainstream success, another libertarian candidate will emerge and split Ron Paul's support. That trick was used to get Schwarzenegger elected as governor of California. In the special recall election, the democrats fielded several candidates, but the republicans all supported Schwarzenegger.
10.  
11. One defect is in the winner-take-all voting system. Instant runoff voting has defects, although it is preferable to winner-take-all. The best system is called "range voting". Each voter rates each candidate on a preference scale of 0-100. The candidate with the highest average approval is the winner. This is the only system that allows people to support third party candidates without detracting from their support for a mainstream candidate.
12.  
13. Another reform is to allow several candidates to be elected from each district, as is done in Europe. Consider a state that gets 20 seats in the House of Representatives. In the current system, a candidate must get 50% in one district to gain a seat. Gerrymandering makes it even harder. If all 20 Representatives were elected statewide, it would only take 5% of the vote to elect someone to office. Such a reform would benefit third party formation. There is no chance that such a reform will occur.
14.  
15. The probability of election reform is zero. The people who control the election rules are the ones who benefit from the current system.
16.  
17. Some people say that a grassroots campaign resembles slaves petitioning their masters to be less cruel.
18.  
19. There are all sorts of defects with the election system.
20.  
21. 1. A candidate cannot get to 50% support without all the free advertising in the form of television news and newspaper coverage. Whenever Clinton or Guliani are mentioned as front-runners, that's effectively a free advertisement for them. Other candidates can be censored just by being ignored. The argument of mainstream media is "we shouldn't spend time covering candidates who have no chance of winning", but that just makes it a self-fulfilling policy.
22.  
23. 2. Corporations and wealthy donors support both candidates in an election. The choice of an election is a false choice.
24.  
25. 3. If a non-approved candidate gains sufficient popularity, other candidates with similar views can be promoted. This will split their support and guarantee that an approved candidate will win.
26.  
27. For example, in the Presidential election of 1992 and 1996, Perot drew support from republicans and guaranteed that Clinton won. In 2000, Nader drew support from democrats and guaranteed that Bush won. A third party candidate with sufficient support can prevent the mainstream candidate he most resembles from winning.
28.  
29. 4. The winner-take-all system guarantees that third parties can't be effectively formed. Without electing candidates to office, a third party movement dies. If the platform of a third party starts being popular, a mainstream candidate will adopt a tiny fraction of the platform and attract votes.
30.  
31. In a Presidential election, the winner-take-all system means that many votes are irrelevant. For example, California is almost certain to be majority democratic in the next Presidential election. Effectively, people in California do not get to vote in the Presidential election because the outcome was predetermined. It does not matter if the democratic candidate wins California with 55% or 80%.
32.  
33. 5. In a closely contested election, 1 vote is less than the sampling error in the polling system. If a major election is decided by 10 or fewer votes, the election is more likely to be decided by a legal dispute than an actual vote count, as happened in the 2000 Presidential election.
34.  
35. 6. With electronic voting and anonymous voting, it's impossible to verify that the election results weren't tampered with. Even paper voting is abusable. For example, there's no way to tell that a dead person didn't vote. The only way to conduct a verifiable election is to publish a list of who voted for whom.
36.  
37. Besides, what right does a majority of 51% have to confiscate my wealth? Anyone with productivity equal or below average can vote to confiscate the wealth of more productive people. The income tax does not hurt wealthy people; it hurts productive people. Wealthy people have the ability to use tax loopholes to avoid taxation. Corporations pass on their taxation expense as higher prices. Wealthy people have the ability to get the government to pass laws giving them special perks; the value of these perks exceed the campaign contributions (bribes) and income taxes paid.
38.  
39. Some people estimate that the rate of return for political campaign contributions is 10,000% or more. That money comes from somewhere. It comes from the wealth confiscated by government activities.
40.  
41. The people with extreme wealth can control the candidates presented for election. Their government perks allow them to confiscate the wealth of people who are productive but not wealthy. They promise token amounts of welfare to the poor to get them complacent and so they vote for the current system. A lot of poor people would be better off under an economic system that was fair but had no welfare.
42.  
43. People say "the government is legitimate because of elections" and "governments without elections are not legitimate". The voting system is defective and corrupt. The current system is the functional equivalent of a system without any elections at all. Therefore, I conclude that the government is not legitimate.
44.  
45. People are tricked into thinking that by advocating one candidate or another, they will accomplish genuine change and improvement. People who sincerely want to improve things have their efforts wasted and frustrated. Is it possible to redirect their efforts into a more productive alternative?