Voting for a third party is pointless. You might as well just stay home if you're going to do that. You might feel better about voting libertarian or writing in Snowden, but it doesn't actually do anything. You're voting as if the system worked differently than it does. It's about as useful and productive as removing all the free() calls from your C code because you think that C really should have garbage collection.
It's not very well known, but if a candidate gets at least 5% of the popular vote then their party gets access to government funding for the next election. 5% is still a pretty tall order (Libertarian party got around 1% in 2012), but it's in the realm of plausibility.
The fact that it's based on the popular vote is great because the Electoral College doesn't get in way. Interestingly, if you live in a state that isn't a swing state, voting third party is possibly more meaningful than voting R or D. For example, if you live in California, voting for Clinton is unnecessary and voting for Trump is pointless, but voting for Stein or Johnson could actually have a real effect.
Utterly false. If the expectation is the actual election of a third party candiate, then sure that is unrealistic given how the two party system actively supresses third party participation. But voting third party contributes to long term objectives of increasing ballot access, funding, visibility, media attention, and decreasing the two-party share of the vote which thereby decreases the legitimacy of two-party outcomes. These in turn can then pressure other politicians across all branches of government to ensact more inclusive electoral reform.
