Third party candidates are rarely voted into office and certainly not at the presidential level. The Rs and D’s have made it so 3rd party candidates are essentially non-viable outside small population areas. The voting system itself needs to change to something like ranked choice for a 3rd party to have a chance.
The parties have been sabotaging any means of the voting system to change. So you are saying that something that is up to the parties need to change which they will not allow to change, such that you can vote third party. That to me just sounds like an excuse to not vote third party, like when people say that they will only do something when an event that they know won’t happen occurs such that they can have no accountability.
One major problem I never hear anyone talk about is that each of the people who want to vote third-party want to do so for very different reasons, often at political extremes. Which is why there’s no “third party” but a bunch of very different tiny parties with very different goals and no electoral pull. So even if you convince every undecided/independent/major party hater voter in the country to vote third party, their votes will never coelesce under any one party enough to make any difference. Of course it all leads back to winner-take-all and first-past-the-post, which are the real enemies of truly representative democracy.
The last time a 3rd party had a chance was Ross Perot, he did not win a single state.
