With the advent of quicker counting technologies (Alaska uses something akin to the infamous Scan-Tron now, which is shiny, damn fast, and has a paper record to back things up) and the internet and things like MoveOn.org's demonstration that well-organized grassroots efforts do too work now, because they can work fast, the political process may well change within our lifetimes. I was deeply impressed with the inadvertent distributed denial of service attack on DC's switchboards when there was a coordinated call-in campaign regarding a sneaky little bill on media monopoly. These days it tends to take a natural (or unnatural *lights a candle*) disaster to generate enough incoming phone calls to take a switchboard down. (I don't think we actually crashed it, because those things are robust and designed to handle a massive amount of incoming calls, but it definitely did clog the works for a while.)
In fact, with organized grassroots (not astroturf, but not quite genuine grassroots -- sodstrips?) politicking, I think a multi-party system could start working now. Anyone want to bring back the Whigs and the Tories?