Primary today, disenfranchisement tomorrow

Here in the US we have a very peculiar political process. Having grown up in the UK, I approach it with fascination, a lack of understanding coupled with a desire to figure it out, and truth be told, a certain measure of ridicule.
Why, for example, does it take a good year or two to elect a president? In this day and age this is ridiculous!
And the whole two party system, combined with historical hangover that is the electoral college, makes things completely idiotic.

Today is primary day here (for those voting in the Democratic party primary): and although we are very early in the primary/caucus process, it actually means that a vote here means more than a vote, say, in Pennsylvania several months from now. Most likely, the candidate will have been picked by then, and their votes will be purely symbolic.

Even here, though, many of my friends already feel disenfranchised: they wanted to vote for Biden or Dodd, Richardson or Kucinich: but they have all already dropped out of the race.
And I am under now apprehension that my choice will win: I voted for John Edwards, not because I dislike Clinton or Obama, not because I am turned off by their campaigning as the media would like to have it, but because I like Edwards more on the issues, on the topics he is choosing to focus on, than Clinton or Obama.
Edwards will not win. He will almost surely come in third place, and not close to second. In that sense, my vote will be meaningless --- except in so far as it is an encouragement to him to stay in the race to be able to spotlight his issues.

In November, I will be effectively disenfranchised. The winner-takes-all electoral college system means that my vote is irrelevant: this state will probably vote republican by at least a ten percent margin, regardless of who the candidates are. And the same is true of most of the country: Texas, New York, California, Wyoming, big or small, states have political trends so far from the parties being competitive that their votes will be taken for granted. Florida, Ohio, and the other "battleground states" will be the only ones taken seriously.

Perhaps this is a part of the root of the disinterest with which the population views the political process, a "my vote won't matter anyway" view which is actually true, in a way that it wouldn't be true in other political systems.

Yours, soon-to-be-disenfranchised,
N.