foiled by arrow's theorem!

while i was in san jose today, i was rather surprised to see a large group of people along the street holding up bush/cheney signs and things that said "honk for bush". strangely enough, even in the liberal state of california, there were a ton of people honking their horns. now i don't mind people holding up bush/cheney signs, but it really annoys me when all the cars around me are honking like crazy. alas, their efforts are almost certainly for naught given the US electoral process.

i'm not sure if i'm going to vote during the elections this year, but i did register to vote this time--something i didn't do 4 years ago. i'm not really sure who i would vote for if i did so. but it's pretty obvious that a lot of people take it very seriously. one of my friends even got mad at me when i told her i was undecided. it seems a lot of people are quick to dismiss undecided voters as uninformed and apathetic. while in my case, they might be right on the apathy count; however, i would say that people who are undecided are more likely to seek out and learn more about each candidate's platforms and thus be more informed than people who blindly vote with/against one party or the other.

so on to my apathy. i don't not care about voting because i don't see eye to eye with the candidates on most of their issues (though that's clearly a detractor). my gripe is that the electoral process itself precludes any candidate that i would genuinely approve of from even getting on the ballot. and that doesn't even include the lunacy that is the electoral college. granted, plurality voting may have seemed good enough hundreds of years ago, but with all this research having been done in electoral theory, why do we still use it? of course, kenneth arrow wisely noted that no election scheme can be "fair" using the independence from irrelevant alternatives criterion, but surely there is something better...

feel free to post your opinions on voting schemes or other issues. perhaps i can become less uninformed.