Voting "against"

I have been voting in Presidential elections for a great many years. Sometimes I have been enthusiastic about a candidate, sometimes not. In recent years two things seem to have happened that have changed my attitude.

In the first place, it's become more and more clear that regardless of who is elected President, there is little they can do without a majority in Congress. The President seems largely a figurehead and to serve as a marker in meetings. (The current President functions mostly as a doorstop, as far as I can tell.) Not only does it not seem to matter who is elected, it seems increasingly clear that both candidates are almost equally inept, and fortunately, because of their lack of genuine power, that doesn't seem to matter either.

Secondly, and this may conflict with the paragraph above, nobody can be elected in a national election without selling some part of his or her soul to the large, moneyed corporations, assuming the candidates have a soul to sell. When a candidate takes a large sum of money, regardless of what he or she promises, they at least owe the money-provider more favorable attention than all of us who did not provide the money. The determinants of choice are not the issues which are most relevant to the welfare and even survival of our country. Instead the politicians are openly willing to be biased by special interest groups, without even the flimsiest pretense at fairness or the welfare of the country as a whole. Can anyone imagine what John Adams or Tom Jefferson would have thought? The system is corrupt from the beginning, and we all know it, and we don't seem to be willing to do anything about it. I would be more apathetic, but it's too much trouble.

We could finance all national elections through a tiny national sales tax on non-essential items. However, if candidates have to make a choice between unlimited funds from corporations and wealthy individuals OR a limited amount under government supervision and scrutiny, why would they even hesitate to choose the former?

Something is also wrong about how candidates are presented to us through the media. For example, I was totally unimpressed by Al Gore during the debates on television. He seemed wooden, unresponsive, cool and vague. His opponent, now the President, He Who Must Not Be Named, looked (God help us) "better". HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? Watching Gore on talk shows or presenting his material on global warning showed me a totally different Al Gore, one who would easily have gotten my enthusiastic vote in that election. How can we vote meaningfully when the information we are given is so inaccurate and inadequate?

I have no intention of voting for President again under the current conditions. The choice between TweedleDumb and TweedleDumber is not palatable. I wish there were a space on the ballot for "None Of The Above". Absent that, perhaps we could all just stop voting until the broken system is fixed....