In the blink of an eye over a month passes by. I intended to write here more often. No, really, I did.

In the past month I got sick, got better, then got sick again. First it was the flu, brought in to my house by my four year old (of course). I'm not one of those healthy-all-the-time people that sit there in front of you and brag, "I never get sick, I just hug and rub my hands all over sick people, neglect to wash my hands, don't take vitamins or eat healthy, and still never even get a sniffle. Oh, and I never gain any weight either..."

I get sick, probably more often than most. I've got allergies and asthma, which basically means I've got a weak respiratory system and I'm vulnerable to those types of illness. Every year around Christmas time I typically spend a week at home with a fever and stuffy nose, watching The Price is Right and The Love Boat. However I am usually pretty healthy during the summer, so I was surprised and annoyed at getting sick.

And then to add insult to injury, just a week after I recovered from the flu, I got food poisoning on Sunday. Over a three day weekend no less. I got it from a well known fast food chain, the one with a star as its symbol. And no, I didn't report it to the health department...

So anyway, I puked all night Sunday and part of Monday. I am never going to eat a hamburger again. Of course, I've said that about tequila before too.

Is there anybody out there that still hasn't become disillusioned with politics? I'm getting sick and tired of all the bullshit public relations and marketing going on with the U.S. elections coming up in a couple months.

It's obvious that the Republican Party have decided that they have to scramble if they don't want to lose a bunch of races this year. The entire Party has been attempting to distance itself from Dubya's administration, and has put pressure on the President to make nice when it comes to all sorts of unpopular Executive Branch policies.

Here in California, our Republican Governor (or Governator depending on who you ask) has also been scrambling to recover ground and appear more moderate to try to salvage not only his campaign for reelection, but the campaigns of other Republicans in the state that supported him once upon a time.

So I'm wondering to myself (and now to you as well), who really buys all these last minute adjustments in an election year? What American thinks to him or herself, "Well I was against all these tax breaks for the rich, persecution of immigrants, and the distraction of Iraq when we should really have been targeting Al Qaeda, but they've seemed to listen to me better in the past couple months so I believe they now really have my interests at heart."

Naahhhhh.

Of course I predicted a big Democrat sweep in 2004, which didn't happen. The problem is that both sides exaggerate and mislead. People that become disillusioned with one Party aren't likely to believe what the other Party says at face value either. Especially when members of that Party contradict and argue with each other like, well, like politicians.

The whole two Party system is flawed. How can the entire spectrum of social and economic thought be cleanly categorized in to only two distinct groups? This stuff isn't black and white.

The Parties have power under this system. The Democratic and Republican Parties each have authority that they use to influence all sorts of elements of everyday America. Right now, the Republican Party has more influence, but that doesn't mean the Democrats are out in the cold. The Green Party or the Libertarian Party would love to have the influence and power that the Democratic Party has even today. The Democrats, of course, would prefer more.

And most Americans "belong" to one of the other of those two primary political Parties. A statistical handful belong to other Parties, each of which is individually referred to as a "Third Party" as if as a nation we can only count to three.

But to be honest, I don't believe that making this a Three Party, Four Party, or Ten Party political system would improve matters. People have to stop associating themselves by default to one side or the other.

As soon as somebody turns eighteen in this country and tries to register to vote, they are confronted with the big question: Which Party will you register with? If you decide you're neither Democrat nor Republican, you are denied the opportunity to vote in the primary elections that determine what candidates will even be presented to you in the official election. Of course, if you register with a "Third Party" you can vote in that Party's primary - some of those people even get elected sometimes, but their numbers and influence overall is very very small. Voters don't want to vote for a Third Party candidate because they believe such a candidate can't win, and that prediction becomes self-fulfilling. It's like a race where everybody knows which two runners will take first and second place, even though they may not be sure which will take which. Any vote for a third place candidate becomes, in their eyes, either a wasted vote or worse.

I'm reminded of the social microcosm that is reality TV's Survivor. In Survivor players will typically align themselves into groups because there is power in numbers. It doesn't always matter whether a person agrees with the opinions and strategy of the people they align with, what matters is whether they end up on the winning side. It's always better to be on the winning side. So people compromise their personal values and game strategy to align with the group that they think has a better chance of winning. And these groups monitor and control their own members by sabotaging or "voting out" people that don't conform - not because they believe conformity is the best possible outcome but because they want to win, period.

So I have two ideas for helping to relieve this political Survivor game we've all become trapped in:

First, let's stop registering voters as belonging to only one particular Party. If people didn't have to choose sides immediately upon joining the political fray, perhaps they would have more open minds when considering the rhetoric of different political candidates.

Second, because by removing the option to register voters by political Party we've now removed the system which makes it possible to hold primary elections, we'll need a new electoral strategy because we end up with far more candidates for each office.

Part of the reason for the two Party system is that if there are multiple candidates that hold one view, but only one candidate holds the opposing view, all things being equal the single candidate has an inherent advantage because the votes from people holding the first view will be split between multiple candidates. The primary system effectively represents an opportunity for a "run-off" after candidates have been narrowed down to two.

So my second suggestion is to institute run off elections. If a winning candidate does not receive a minimum percentage of all the votes (say 40%), we have a run off between the top three candidates. Some states in the U.S.A. already do this for local elections, as do some countries in their national elections. It's an effective alternative to the Party Primary system which strips the Parties of much of their current power.

OK, I'm done writing now.

In the meantime, I encourage you to vote according to your real opinion in the coming elections, rather than by your party affiliation. As long as that doesn't mean you're voting Republican...

eloi