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... The difference is here in the USA we have a flawed system. A system that while it makes sense with a small federal government and a small-ish state government, is fundamentally broken. A system that gives you two choices, either A or B, a system that is designed not to give you a third choice.
When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.

Indeed.

Look up Approval Voting for a balloting method that does not squeeze out third parties.

Wikipedia article on Approval Voting
Citizens for Approval voting
Approval Voting and the Good Society

It wouldn't solve all ills, but I think it'd be valuable to encourage "Approval Voting". Third parties have basically no chance to get any traction under the current voting system. In approval voting, you can "vote for more than one candidate if you so choose. The winner is the candidate that collects the most votes."

It's not perfect, but it has lots of advantages. Existing voting equipment can be used (including paper counted by machine), and it's easy to understand. I think it's much better than our current system, while still being simple to understand and apply.

Citizens for Approval Voting and Americans for Approval Voting have more info, if you're curious.

To illustrate the benefits with an extreme example, suppose you have an Sunni militant, a Shiite militant and a moderate running for office in a district in Iraq that is 60/40 Sunni/Shiite district. Imagine that this district is essentially our current popular conception of Iraq: all 60% of the Sunni's prefer the Sunni supremacist but would settle for the moderate; all 40% of the Shiite's prefer the Shiite militant but would accept the moderate. IRV would elect the Sunni militant. Approval voting would elect the secular moderate. It's easy to see how approval voting couuld arrest the devolution of governments toward civil war.

Getting back to our more fortunate country, consider the case of a district 55% Democrat and 45% Republican, with a third party "spoiler" candidate who is be the first choice of just under half of the Democrats. With plurality voting, the third party candidate is a spoiler and the Republican wins. With Instant Runoff, the democrat wins. With Approval Voting, it depends on the nature of this third party candidate. If the third party candidate is someone who appeals only to Democrats, then the mainstream Democrat would win, just like with IRV. But if the third party candidate is also acceptable to enough Republicans (even if not first choice to them), he may garner more approvals than either of the other two candidates.

Also, approval voting means that having a majority committed to vote for you does not guarantee victory. It is possible for someone to be beaten with 55% approval by someone with 75% approval. So the only way a politician could have a "safe" district would be to have a majority that is committed to voting for him or her _exclusively_, which would greatly reduce the number of safe districts.

I'm not saying that Approval Voting would create a Utopia. It's only one of many political adjustments that I'd like to see experimented with at municipal, then state, and then federal levels, but I'd encourage those interested to get involved here and, if you're a US citizen, here.

Approval Voting fixes all your woes.

The compromise is Approval Voting

You vote for a third party. Really, people, it's not that hard.

That's how we ended up in this mess in the first place. A large number of people voted for third parties in 2000. We still ended up with a major party in charge, but we ended up with the greater of two evils. It is going to continue this way until we get an alternate voting system, like runoff or approval voting.

It is clear that most of the people who voted for Nader would have preferred Gore to Bush, and the Green party was the leading third party 2000. In voting for Nader, Green voters sabotaged the system (from their own point of views) and cost Gore the election, thus proving -- for those people -- that the American election system does not work. I'd go further and propose that many people who did vote for Gore or Bush would have preferred somebody else, but knew that a vote for a third party in the USA is a waste of a vote. Not only the Greens are disenfranchised by our existing system; Buchanan voters got their preferred second choice this time around, but only because they got lucky that there was massive voting fraud in Florida. Libertarians have been consistently disenfranchised for -- well, forever. The last time we had a third party president elected was in 1860, when Lincoln was elected.

Admittedly, I was part of the problem in 2000; I voted for a third party, too. I won't make that mistake this time around, though. I don't know if Kerry will make a bad president, but I know Bush is a bad one, and I'll take a chance on someone who hasn't proven himself to be incompetent.