It sends a message to the 2nd party that they’re not doing enough for my vote. If they want my vote, they’ll have to change their policies to be more like the party I voted for.
If the losing party loses by 10,000 votes, and 10,000 people voted third party, guess what, the strategists are going to try to find a way to capture those votes.
Without those 10,000 votes for 3rd party, the 2nd party either does nothing or tries to get votes from the other side, moving their policies further toward the 1st party.
I would say in the current political climate, 3rd party voting is more important than ever. The idea that it’s a vote for the other side is an absolute farce, an attempt at preventing change, and couldn’t be further from the truth.
Linux kernel doesn’t include a spell checking dictionary soooooo Linux doesn’t worry about whether things are words. Your particular spellchecker doesn’t seem to think linux is a word but “aspells dict on my machine doesn’t consider linux a word” sounds a lot dumber (because it is pretty dumb)