MOST PEOPLE assume that if they don't align their single vote with a mass movement of thousands, they can't possibly determine the result of the election. They're wrong.

Elections are won and lost by the people who voted for John Kennedy because they liked his wife. Elections are determined by the aggregate of all the little plans people use to decide their vote. So you can vote according to this scheme and assume that everyone else is either voting to support your plan (which is unlikely) or is voting against your plan (which is impossible).

The importance of voting shouldn't be overplayed. But perhaps you can glean a little existential satisfaction out of the process of indicating one of your decisions. So when you do vote, the process has to have some ostensible meaning. You have to have a Grand Plan which can count towards effecting some sort of result (so your act can have meaning) and which will give some purpose to your participating in the process (so your act will have a meaning). Here it is:

You vote differently depending on which state you live in with the object of throwing the election into the House of Representatives. People in the Northeast (plus Minn., Mich., III., and W.Va.) should go Humphrey. People in the South (plus Va., Tenn., and Ind.) should vote Wallace. All the rest should stay with Nixon.

The actual result of the election as decided in the House is of no importance. The two parties will pick one of their own (read: Humphrey or Nixon) to be President. It is even possible that Republicans in New York would elect a slate of electors who would bolt, to the man, from Nixon to Rockefeller giving him forty-three electoral votes which would be hypothetically more than the candidate who finished third thereby making Rockefeller one of the three Constitutional candidates for the office and the eventual compromise pick for President.

A list of candidates who would definitely not be chosen President by the House under any circumstances includes George Wallace, Gene McCarthy, Eldridge Cleaver, Alan Daly, you, me, the kid on the next block, and all other announced candidates. (There's little existential meat in the outcome.)

THE REASONS for having you throw the election into the House are ultimately pragmatic, if cathartic. There are three. They are numbered:

1) Whichever-President will have the mandate of only a small part of the population, a situation which Richard Nixon said in Boston would make it impossible for the President to rule. A weak Presidency can only hurt the conservatives (Nixon) because the Congress wouldn't let Humphrey do anything liberal even if he were elected.

A stalemate in the popular vote would leave whichever-President without the national support he needs to carry on a war as adventuresome as the war in Vietnam. The reasons for not being at war are always there in the public's subconscious; so if left to its own inertia, popular opinion would be constantly carrying us towards peace. But the new President would have to show us why we would be killing ourselves and would have to prove we want to continue doing so. Even a Richard Nixon, who managed to win only in the House, would feel himself unable to spark the needed enthusiasm.

2) Having the House decide the Presidential election would be one of those cataclysms that drives the Congress to action. In the same way that three assassinations and civil rights marches on the scale of Selma led to long-talked-about legislation, the buying-and-selling-votes catastrophe in the House would scare up enough initiative to amend the Constitution to elect the President by popular majority.

3) After Wallace proves that your vote is not wasted in voting for a third party candidate, people will incorporate third and fourth parties into the elections and subsequent government by voting for them as regularly as they would vote for the other two. If there are more than two parties, they will, by necessity, have to represent coherent factions of thought since otherwise they would be unable to draw support away from the Republicans and Democrats. The old parties, in turn, would have to clarify their identities to compete with the new challenges. The left and the right would be represented for the first time and would find a more meaningful middle ground than that which the Democrats and Republicans have decided is the mainstream.

VOTING differently depending on what state you're in isn't as simple as it sounds. Right now the plan divides states to stop Nixon. For example, Illinois is told to go Humphrey, and Indiana for Wallace.

The voters in Illinois and Indiana have to make sure Nixon does not get the vote. Because the two anti-Nixon men are very close, existential voters in these states will have to keep up with the polls, read the daily newspapers, and switch candidates if the other has a better chance of beating Nixon.

As usual, people should work actively for the campaign they believe in. A campaigner in Illinois will be collaring blue collar workers and telling them that Wallace is looney. If the polls then show a shift in sentiment giving Wallace a lead over Humphrey, the campaigner will start telling them that Nixon isn't as much of a reactionary as they think and they'd better make it with Wallace soon. But ostensibly being a member of the Humphrey campaign staff, he's in a great position to convert Humphrey votes. And, in fact, it is from the Humphrey camp that he will be expected to pick up the most Wallace votes.

The Big Frustration of American politics is that it's impossible to get the feeling that the vote you cast made a difference. The only gratification you can get is in having voted for the winner, in which case you feel good for having spotted the "best" candidate back when the result was still in doubt.