I dont understand why more United States citizens aren't voting for the underdogs. In the last election, it was possible for the greens to "win" . If you want to protest, instead of not voting, vote for the least likely to win. It makes a statistical analysis of the "protest votes" possible.. Under some (eg, normal curves) statistical models, you assume that the non-sampled closely resemble the sampled (with some level of confidence). By not voting you're basically saying "dont worry, I am very much like the 'norm'" . By voting for the underdog you're helping to elucidate the fact that you are not represented by the main parties.
There's a common narrative that the two major parties are disliked, but win because people feel they have no alternative. That the will of the people gets railroaded by the political process. That things like TSA, wiretapping, drones, etc. are plots by those in power that the American people dislike but are powerless to change.
This narrative is dead wrong.
There are not many people who are properly fed up with the two major parties. The vast majority of the electorate still strongly identifies as either R or D. They may not agree with everything, but they will still see people from their party as "our guy". Those who do not identify with a political party but still feel strongly about politics are very much in the minority. You probably routinely hear about how Congress's approval rating is in the single digits. What doesn't get as much play is that the average approval rating for an individual representative by their constituents is still quite high. People may dislike Congress as a whole, but they like their own people.
As for these bad policies, there's a simple reason they persist: people want them. The Rs and Ds differ on many significant issues, but not on these. They want the TSA, they want massive anti-terrorism surveillance, they want terrorist leaders killed by faraway drone strikes.
The American electorate is, by and large, terrified of al Qaeda and anything that resembles them. Just look at the reaction to the attempt to try the Guantanamo prisoners in New York. Just the idea of bringing terrorists into the country, no matter how harmless they've been rendered, frightened people out of their minds. You can talk about "security theater" all you want, but the TSA makes them feel safe to take an airplane. The fourth amendment is a distant and abstract concept compared to the possibility that massive surveillance might prevent another Boston Marathon bombing. The collateral damage from drones is sad, but every terrorist they kill is one that can't blow up a building in the US, and a lot of those other people killed were probably terrorist sympathizers anyway.
Now, to be clear, I don't agree with any of this, and I expect most people here don't. Which is, of course, part of the problem. If you hang out on HN, you get the idea that everyone thinks these security programs are terrible overreaches, and if you have that idea, then there's only one possible conclusion: politicians are ignoring the people to advance their own agenda.
The reality is much scarier: on these issues, politicians are simply listening to the people. This is scarier because it's vastly easier to convince politicians to obey the people's will than it is to change the people's will.
I have no idea how you go about convincing the American public that it's not worth doing these things to fight terrorism, but that is what must be done if these things are to change. Telling people to vote for third parties isn't going to cut it, because people don't want to vote for third parties. They want to vote for for the major parties because the major parties are by and large the ones with the policies they like.
