My question though is constitutional, since in NY, your essentially voting directly for the canidate, just under different parties, but what if, under the constitution, you just voted for the slate committed to voting for the canidate, say a 3rd party slate that will vote for Bush, even if its got a canidate of its own.
I'm not a lawyer but I think whichever slate wins the most votes goes to the electoral college, but if a party chose another party's slate, that's tantamount to voting for the candidate that the other party's slate committed to so there isn't really much of a crisis there. In your example it would be a roundabout way of voting for Bush so Bush's total votes (i.e. all votes for a Bush-committed slate) would have to be bigger than Kerry's.