Is voting for a third party candidate "wasting" a vote?

I am going to take a political dance around this question if I may.

It is wasting a vote in the highly contested environment that we are currently in. Not that all presidential elections aren't highly contested, but the emotions involved in the last few elections have been so strong and extreme to one side or the other. John Kerry lost the presidential bid in 2004 by over 3 million votes. What if over 3 million people had voted for Ralph Nader (which obviously didn’t happen) then the 1% of people who choose to vote 3rd party may have swayed the nation’s presidential campaign without doing it on purpose.

The reason I’ve heard from a lot of people for voting 3rd party is because they didn’t like either of the 2 primary party candidates. That is definitely a wasted vote. If you know you’re 3rd party isn’t going to win, and you don’t like either of the other 2 candidates how are you helping to change the nation? Democracy runs based on people supposedly voting for what they believe to be right and just. If you vote for a person, cause, or party that you know isn’t going to come through you are basically throwing your opinions (vote) into the wind. What I mean by that is this:

Say you didn’t like George Bush because he is ‘too aggressive’ on the GWOT issue.

You didn’t like John Kerry because he was ‘too weak’ to handle national security issues.

You voted for Ralph Nader because of your distaste in the other 2 candidates, knowing full well that either Kerry or President Bush were going to win. You just allowed one of those 2 to win because of a failure to make a hard decision.

Instead the million+ people who voted 3rd party should have done some good research and some hard thinking as to which of the 2 (Kerry/Bush) they would prefer over the other. That wouldn’t have swayed the final results (as President Bush won by over 3 million), but if those 3rd party voters and even 1% of the other voters would have actually done some research and thinking about their vote (as opposed to voting the party line, or because CNN/the Union Manager/Hollywood/etc. told them it was popular), then things may have turned out differently.

Heck if everyone who votes does their own thinking and research on the candidates, and votes that way, we may actually get a 3rd party elected one of these days. We’ve changed majority parties in this nation many times in the past, and even the major parties themselves have undergone many changes in the past. Did you know that the Democratic Party (pre-1970) was pro-interventionalist around the world, and the Republican Party was pro-isolationist? After the Vietnam War and during the second Cold War (1981-1990) the party lines switched.

Think before you vote, and it won’t be a waste.