Use money. If a politician is pissing you off on some issue, write and say 'I've donated to your opponent'. Unlike voting, donations are recorded and public information, so if you donate $50 to Party B, (even though you support party A at heart), then the Party A candidate has to raise an extra $50 at the next election. You can always donate to Party A closer to the election if you want to even things out, but donating between cycles is a very powerful way of sending a message. Alternatively, support a primary challenger. Money talks. Is this institutionalized corruption? Sort of, but I'm not sure it's something you can ever legislate away.

If you don't want to spend money, you can also change your party registration. Also, write letters on actual paper. They have to be opened and filed, and have considerably more impact than phone calls, faxes, or emails. Or write an op-ed explaining why a politician's vote on some topic is wrong.

I agree with you from the pragmatic viewpoint, what can we do now, but you're proposing a workaround to a system that (IMHO) addresses the wrong problem and is fundamentally broken.

Maybe it addresses an old problem from before the information age, maybe at that point your best hope was to send someone off to represent you, someone whom you felt was in tune with your community and would do what they did with a deep understanding of who you were. Perhaps this was necessary because you couldn't hope to keep up with the news or the unfolding of events in a timely fashion.

Now this is no use to anyone, every candidate is a mess of good and bad, I want my voice to be heard on the things I believe in, not just on voting in some asshole who happens to be slightly better than some other asshole. Because the first asshole takes your vote as a mandate to pursue their full 'platform', regardless of the fact that most people voted for them simply because they had one less repellent, abhorrent policy on their manifesto.

Swiss style democracy should be spread around the world.

Tha's very idealistic and I'd like to agree, but the thing is you're one voter among millions - tends of millions, if you're electing a Senator in CA. There's a whole string of reforms I'd like to see (beginning with Senate representation) but realistically that requires redrafting the constitution, which isn't happening soon (although it's not as remote a possibility as you may imagine).

But all that said, money does talk and it's the best way to move the needle on a single issue - directly to the candidate if you can do it in quantity, via lobbying organization (eg the EFF) if you can't.