That's the kind of gameplaying you have when you have political parties. Political parties themselves are a perversion of any truly democratic process. You don't need them to have elections. You don't need them to have viable candidates. You don't need them to have a working, functioning government.

What you do need if you want a good and fair election process is nonpartisan candidates who represent a wide variety of views and who are all financed equally from a public election fund and who all get an equal amount of airtime in the media to present their views.

That would be a good and fair election process.