In Australia we have a preferential ordering system (if your most preferred party does terribly on first preferences, they are eliminated and your vote goes to your second-most preferred and so on) and a truly inspired suggestion from a friend was to create a Poe's Law Party.

This party would campaign on obviously wrong economic policy platforms, have extremely inconsistent social policies that they regularly backflip on, and bombard the populace with content-less advertisments. They would flub every debate and speech, resort to incoherent or irrelevant talking points on every single interview question, and so on. They would just be terrible. And the idea was, when the ballots are counted, any ballot that doesn't have the Poe's Law Party last doesn't get counted.

Ideally we would have a computer doing a Bayesian calculation taking "placement of PLP first", "placement of PLP second" (and so on) as evidence of bad voting skills, and have their vote's value diminished by an appropriate amount. But likely saying "your vote will be devalued by an arcane computation that determines exactly how stupid you are with respect to voting" will enrage many people.

Calling the US voting system "modern" is a bit of a stretch - it's been around for a few centuries now. Given that quite a few other countries use voting systems that help alleviate the US "two party" problem, it's not like there aren't more up-to-date already-tested alternatives out there, too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Causes is a decent starter; I've spent a few years avoiding politics so I'd just be parroting others if I recommended anything specific :))

Yes, that's also worth considering - but is not the topic of this post. I suggest writing a different post on that.