My vote counts?
If you live in Mississippi, as I do, you may as well stay home. Most of the candidates have already dropped out and the primary here isn't for several weeks yet. Why is this? Because Mississippi is one of the few states that didn't move their primary back into February or, in some cases, January. This whole election was co-opted from the start whenever they started jacking the primary dates all around. Hell, that started last summer!
If the primary were tomorrow, which it isn't, I would have only John McCain to vote for on the Republican side and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to choose from for the Democrats, with an oddball write-in or two thrown in for those few who actually do their homework and want to vote for someone they truly believe is better. And, to make things worse, the primary is the ONLY opportunity any of us get to directly vote for a Presidential candidate.
As you may remember from past elections, from here it goes to the conventions and then there will be two absolute candidates that will get all of the Media attention, while the likes of Ron Paul are left to depend on the kindness of strangers and good word of mouth to mount a campaign against the big two. No third party candidate has successfully done so in recent history. The third party candidate is, at best, reduced to the role of spoiler (see Ross Perot) where he will drag down one or another of the candidates but never get enough votes to win in his own right.
Anyway, ultimately the electoral college decides it with their votes, not the votes of the American people (see Bush v Gore, 2000 which, in that case was actually decided by the Supreme Court, but hey, who's counting?).
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