The biggest SOPA supporter of them all is still in the White House...but on the other front, recreational marijuana was legalized in two states. Still illegal federally (I'm sure Obama will once again break his promise not to go after it), and it will still keep you from getting a job (not that you could anyway)...but at least local cops can't arrest for it anymore. G/L marriage also got a shot in the arm...overall a pretty good election other than the most powerful office...hopefully the republicans will not run a stuffy rich white guy again next time...it simply doesn't work anymore.

Originally posted by SoulGLOW:

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Well said. I can't help but wonder how many votes were flipped on the machines to keep Gary Johnson from getting 5% of the popular vote.

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The system is optimized to keep the bipartisan party in place...not just vote rigging, but the system itself.

For starters we have the electoral college...a holdover from the days before the telegraph, when the average voter knew nothing about any of the non-local candidates. The idea was that people would vote for someone semi-local that knew about the national figures, and trust that person to vote for the right person. It has been claimed that an accidental positive by-product of this is that the votes of people in less populated areas count for more...but if this is actually wanted, a popular vote could simply have modified numbers, such as an individual vote from Alaska being worth 2 individual votes from Florida. THERE IS NO REASON FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.

Then you have the state vote blocks...if 51% of the votes from a state go to a candidate, they all do. If it was a 3 party system, then it could take as little as 33.334% of votes in a state to have all the votes of the state go to one candidate. If there was only one electoral vote for a state this might make sense (ignoring that the electoral college doesn't make sense in the media age)...but no states have just one electoral vote.

The last issue that prevents a third party candidate (or even a decent candidate from the bipartisan party) from having a chance is that votes are essentially locked to one candidate. Many people vote for a person because they think that person has a better chance of winning than the candidate they want. For instance, in the last election many Ron Paul supporters voted for Romney because they didn't think Ron Paul could win, and they figured Romney was better than Obama. Ron Paul ended up with under 1% of the popular vote...if he could have setup some kind of agreement that he would give his votes to Romney if he had more votes, and Romney would give his votes to Paul if he had more votes, a lot more people would have voted for the person they wanted...in fact a lot of people who didn't bother would have voted too. It may or may not have changed the results, but at least the people would have had their votes registered the way they wanted them. Of course, this would all have to be on a pre-election agreement system...forming such pacts after election is how the Nazi party took over Germany.

So, three major hurdles to any third party or half-decent bipartisan party candidate achieving the presidency...all without the slightest bit of voter fraud.