This past Friday’s news dump was an agreement between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s camps that Hillary’s name will be put in nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Both sides are trying to sell this as the last step towards bridging the gap between Obama and Clinton supporters, but the only way that assertion could be made more ludicrous would be to resurrect Neville Chamberlain and have him wave a sheet of paper in the air proclaiming this move to bring "peace in our time" for the Democrats. The possibility of this happening had been making the rounds for a couple of weeks before the announcement, particularly Hillary seeming to endorse such a move when speaking with supporters. A video of this endorsement made the rounds on YouTube, and was notable not just because Hillary seemed to be speaking to about twenty-five people in someone’s backyard, but because she was using an audio setup that looked like a karaoke machine from around 1992. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Hillary’s supporters have been pressing for this, apparently because losing to Obama once wasn’t painful enough.

All the political talking heads are saying that Obama will win the roll call vote at the convention, but let’s face it: it wouldn’t exactly be entirely unexpected for Hillary to somehow win the roll call vote next week. Depending on your opinion of the Clintons, you can imagine them doing whatever might have been necessary — begging, pleading, dealing, threatening — to wrest away just enough delegates so that when the roll call happens, somehow Hillary winds up on top. You can even imagine Hillary with a fake look of surprise on her face — or is that her natural facial expression when she’s campaigning — as she is announced as the Democratic presidential nominee. You might even be able to see her not-so-subtly elbowing a slack-jawed Obama into an awaiting refuse pile as she goes up to wave to her loving supporters on the stage, saying, "You like me, you really like me!"

This is just one of the ways in which our democratic process is so messed up. Although some states’ delegates are legally obligated to cast their votes according to their state’s primary results, many have no such obligation, and of course there’s the whole insipid issue of "superdelegates" that we got pounded into our heads for so long this past spring. If Hillary gets more than 50% of the vote next week, she will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, regardless of the past several weeks of All Obama, All the Time from the Democrats. Heck, according to the Democratic Party’s own rules, it is entirely possible that a week from this Thursday, Dennis Kucinich will be giving his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination in prime time. Yeah, I’m not holding my breath on that one either.

In theory, these little glitches in our political system could produce some very interesting situations, where a Carvillian or a Rovian figure could find the right combination of loopholes to exploit to rig the system and create a result that no one could possibly expect, which would, at the very least, be entertaining as all get-out. That’s just in theory, though, and in practice these types of situations never end well, whether you’re talking about the real-life pain of Florida 2000, or the even worse fictional pain of the Swing Vote screenplay. As annoying as these glitches are, though, I wouldn’t have our electoral system any other way, if only because it creates a modicum of suspense for things like next week’s vote on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, a bit of something to ponder over while fifty-plus states give the same old tired introductions for their states before they cast their votes. ("Ohio, the Buckeye State, the birthplace of presidents, the home of the national tractor pulling championships, the state where one out of every three residents has seen squirrels doing it in a public park …")

This is as compelling an argument as I can come up with for people to vote for third-party candidates, because then we could be figuring out these loopholes for months on end. Imagine we took today’s electoral college projection, but we gave Washington and Oregon to Ralph Nader, and one or two of those barely-red states to Bob Barr. Neither Obama nor John McCain would even come close to the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the nomination, and so we would go through a series of complicated steps familiar to all serious political scholars (or serious fans of The West Wing) to determine who would actually be our 44th president. November 4th would then become merely the first step towards choosing a president, and the news networks would be forced to pull focus a little from Obama and McCain and redirect it towards the various machinations that would ultimately determine the next commander-in-chief. Sure, it would circumvent direct democracy even more than the electoral college system already does, but at least it would be entertaining, and people need something to occupy their time now that they’re done cheering for Michael Phelps.