After Ron Paul suggested last month that people "send a message" by voting for any of the third party presidential candidates, I criticized the idea, pointing out that voting for the lesser of six evils is no better than voting for the lesser of two and that "send[ing] a message" is both ineffective and insulting to voters ("Wrong Paul," Fairfield County Weekly, Sept. 18).

Soon after, Paul decided to endorse a single candidate (the Constitution Party's Chuck Baldwin), and to back off of the idea of sending a message. With both moves, Dr. Paul, the Congressman from Texas whose broad support stems from his consistent message of liberty, launched a maelstrom of discussion about the possibility of third parties ever making a difference.

In terms of elected office-holders and number of candidates, the Libertarian Party is by far the third largest party in the U.S. In the last election cycle, Libertarians garnered 13.4 million votes. But the party makes hardly a dent in presidential elections. Its best showing was in 1980 when California's Ed Clark collected 1.1 percent of the vote.

Part of the reason for the low showing for third party candidates is the often misunderstood Duverger's law. It is typically expressed as a law of political science that a winner-takes-all system, like ours, will always lead to two strong parties with no viable third. That's not exactly right.

Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist, described this thought experiment in 1972: Imagine a district with 100,000 moderate voters and 80,000 communists. "If the moderates are divided into two parties," he wrote, "the communist candidate may well win the election," so long as each of the moderate party candidates collects at least 20,000 votes (meaning the other couldn't get more than 80,000, the number that would go to the communist). "In the following election," he continues, "the two parties with moderate views will naturally tend to unite." In other words, third parties can win; it is the old, formerly major parties that will need to merge.

So Duverger's law is actually a description of why third parties lose, as well as a recipe for how they can win. The problem is that supporters of causes championed by third parties do not vote for third party candidates. In his example, if the communists, afraid their preferred candidate of the two moderates will lose, split their vote, the communist party itself would never win. In our example, if Libertarians and other freedom-loving people split their votes among Libertarian, Constitution, Green and independent candidates, as well as the two major parties, then there will never be freedom. The key is loyalty and turnout. But which party should freedom-lovers unite behind? What should the platform be?

Non-major parties sometimes achieve a measure of success by being single issue parties. In 1844, abolitionist James G. Birney ran under the banner of the Liberty Party, a spiritual ancestor of the Libertarian Party, dedicated to the single issue of abolishing slavery. Only 2.3% voted for him though it certainly brought the issue into national attention.

In America today, it would be impossible to launch new parties for single issues. A get-out-of-Iraq party or a no-bailout party would have to choose leaders and collect signatures in each state to be recognized by each Secretary of the State. Then they would have to collect even more signatures to petition their way onto the ballot (which would be challenged by the major parties). Finally, they would have to choose candidates and advertise themselves starting from zero recognition.

In fact, we can extend Duverger's law to multiple third parties. So long as only one of them is clearly for liberty, liberty-loving people can ignore the others. If we concentrate our votes, and have the moral strength to avoid voting for the lesser of two major party evils, then there can be success.

Paul's decision to throw all of his endorsement weight behind a single candidate is a model for success. The message to voters is simple: vote for candidates of liberty, not against candidates of the government. And do so in every election, including local ones.