I know this is a site for Democrats, but changing election rules to allow instant runoff voting could pressure democrats to act like Democrats, for starters.
If the next election allowed something like instant run-off voting, so you could vote for your first choice AND your second and third choice candidates, would you vote for a third party candidate?
With instant run-off voting, you specify your first, second and third choices. Then, the votes are tallied and the candidate with the least votes is dropped. Whoever had that candidate as first choice then has his second choice applied to the vote. There's a re-tabulation and again, the candidate with the least votes is dropped and second choices are added in.
This approach makes certain that the winner as 50% plus one vote and makes it a lot more likely that voters have a say and can not only vote for the candidate they like the most but also the one lesser of two evils candidate they usually would vote for.
The question is, if you could vote with this kind of system, would you vote for a third party contender, knowing you had a back-up choice?
I ran this poll on my site, opednews.com, which only has 60,000 registered members, generally a bit to the left of kosfolk, and was very surprised by the response.