Pending the eight months of recounts and talk of pregnant ballots, we have now thankfully come to the conclusion of yet another unbearable election. And I think we can all agree nobody actually voted for a candidate they liked; we all voted against the candidate we hated more.

People often say that voting for a candidate not because you like that candidate but because you really don’t like his or her opponent is not a good reason to vote. They say that voting should not be a decision of who you hate the least.

But that doesn’t make any sense; why is voting just to vote against a candidate looked down upon? That’s often a reason given by people who don’t vote. They say, "I really hate this candidate, but I don’t much care for the opposition. So why bother voting?"

That’s bullcrap! You hate one candidate, so you’re going to help his chances of winning by not voting for the other guy just because the other guy doesn’t blow your mind?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with voting for a candidate you don’t like just because you don’t like the other candidate even more. Now, I know the people who back third-party candidates are going to be incredibly offended by that statement, so let me rephrase it slightly: There is absolutely nothing wrong with voting for a candidate you don’t like just because you don’t like the other candidate more, and the one you’re voting for is the only other candidate who has a chance of winning.

I know that’s not fair, but it’s true. Look at the 2000 election; a bunch of hippies didn’t like George W. Bush because of the whole oil companies thing, but they didn’t really like Al Gore either because they thought he was boring, and they didn’t like the way he Frenched his wife.

So instead of just voting against Bush by way of voting for Gore, they decided to vote for Ralph Nader, because he seemed like a cool guy, and he wanted to "legalize it." Sure, he had a "chance" of winning, but it was in the same way that a street-talking, upright-walking anthropomorphic hippopotamus has a "chance" of existing just because nobody has found the last remaining one and killed it.

Thus because they didn’t vote against the guy they hated more, the guy they hated more won. And four years later, do you think all those hippies would have protested a guy who wrote a book with a name like "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit" as much as they’ve protested Bush?

I think the vast majority of everybody who votes only votes because they’re voting against somebody. However, as previously mentioned, this really screws third-party candidates.

It’s not that a third-party candidate couldn’t do a good job as president. I mean, the anti-federalists had a good run, right? It’s just that when there are two candidates that are garbage, and when it seems like those are the only two candidates that have a chance of winning, the decision of voting for a third-party candidate becomes a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts.

"Well, I would vote for this one third-party candidate that I think is right in every way," we all think, "but he doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning, so I’ll just vote for this doucher because he has a chance." Just like how the prisoner doesn’t trust the other prisoner to keep his mouth shut, none of us would trust everybody else to vote for the best candidate instead of the candidate we hate the second most.

You hear that, America? I’m comparing voting to being in prison. What are you going to do about it?

We should just admit that, as bad as it sounds, voting doesn’t work. We get two candidates we don’t like, but we’re afraid to vote for anybody except these two crappy candidates because we think that since nobody else has a chance of winning, a vote for anybody else is a wasted vote.

What we need to do is add the "voting-against" factor in to the election equation. People should be given the option of either voting for a candidate, or tallying a negative vote against a candidate they don’t like.

Here me out: This way, if you don’t like either of the two major candidates, you can cast your vote to say "just give me anybody except this dirt bag!" This way, you don’t have to endorse a candidate you don’t like just because you really hate his main opposition.

With this system, the democratic and republican candidates would both get about negative 20 million votes, and we’d have nothing but third-party candidates for the rest of our history (which kind of obviously negates the label of third party). The winning candidate would win with six votes, and would end up being the person who people care so little about that nobody bothers to vote against him or her.

Sure, it would suck real bad at first when we elect a candidate from The National Barking Spider Resurgence Party as president, but it would eventually get worked out.

See, the problem is that right now only halfwits and idiots run as third-party candidates, because the smart people who could function as president know that they have no chance of winning. Thus, we get stuck with the sleaze balls from the two major parties. But if we could vote against the sleaze balls, eventually we would probably stop getting sleaze balls. Maybe.