@firelord111:
How is this democracy if you cannot vote for third party
It's not that you aren't ALLOWED to vote Third Party, you are. This is a de-facto 2 party system.
There are a multitude of factors at play causing this. The system itself is built in a way that makes it happen.
Basically, the electoral college and things of that nature are such that Winner takes all and the losers get nothing.
Add to that a lazy and hyper-partisan electorate.
Basically, not enough people care about voting, and the half of the country that does is primarily made up of people who are either super loyal to their party, or just likes having the easy short-hand of the two parties to reference. The two parties we have are known for their positions on certain issues like "Republicans are Pro-Gun, while Democrats are open to putting reasonable restrictions on Gun ownership Want to take away everyone's guns.", "Democrats are Pro-LGBT while Republicans are Anti-LGBT" etc.
This makes it easy for people to distill voting down to a few basic things and then pick the party that sides with them on those issues more rather than having to pick individual people.
The Third parties unfortunately haven't done enough yet in this country to give themselves that name recognition with the general public. Ask a lay person on the street what the Libertarians or the Green Party stand for and they probably can't give you much. Most will usually assume (correctly) that one of the Green Party's stated goals is pro-enviromentalist stuff… and that's it. It's not really general knowledge where they stand on a lot of issues and Jill Stein's erratic flip flopping won't help this image.
All of this swirls together into the perfect shitstorm that kills 3rd parties' viability.
In order to become viable, they NEED more exposure. The public at large NEEDS to be able to say at the drop of the hat what all the major stances of these parties are. It would be nice if the system were overhauled to give them a fairer shot, but exposure is the BIGGEST one…. but they keep shooting themselves in the foot over it.
They don't bother trying to get people into the lower levels of government. We have exactly 0 3rd party people in our 535 person strong congress. There are TWO independents, but zero people actually affiliated with a 3rd party.
No, they aren't putting in the effort to actually get their names out or get people into the lower houses of government where they have a better shot to show the public what they're about in practice. NOPE. They just keep going straight for the Presidential elections. Why? Surprisingly, it's NOT so they can be president. It's money.
If they can get at least 5% of the vote, they get federal funding like one of the big boy parties.
On the one hand, you can decry money in politics. Since it DOES make it hard for someone without money to do well…. but Bernie was able to grassroots fundraise a LOT of support by actually putting in the damn effort. Which the 3rd parties routinely refuse to do... which is supremely dumb of them because the "Just try to get 5% in the presidential to get that funding" method is flat out not working. The 2016 election was SUPER contentious with BOTH major candidates (Clinton and Trump) being hated by a big swath of the country. It was the PERFECT scenario for the 3rd parties to finally get that 5% they wanted so bad and they didn't care if they swayed the election to Trump to do it… So, what did they get?
Gary Johnson came in 3rd with a whopping 3.27% of the vote. He had two of the absolute most hated candidates against him and he couldn't pull it off. It's not gonna happen.
So TL;DR: You ARE free to vote for a 3rd party if you want in this country, but a perfect shitstorm of a winner-take-all system, a lazy and hyperpartisan electorate, and inept and ineffective 3rd parties means that while 3rd parties CAN run and you CAN vote for them, they have absolutely 0 chance of actually winning. At least for the foreseeable future.
That's why the more pragmatic folks here say a vote for a 3rd party President is a waste. Lower levels of government however? Senator or Representative level? By all means, let's get more of those folks in.
(Sorry for the length of this, but it's kindof a clusterfuck and not easy to properly explain in few words IMO)