The only way to avoid voting for a bucket of shit is by not voting at all. The best you can do is aim for the best apparent ratio of good stuff to shit and hope for the best.
Funnily enough no. There are voting systems where the little guy with an appealing message can get the chance without actually throwing your vote into the trashcan, see: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/improving-democracy-through-math/
Well there are certainly advantages to that. You have to be careful though, sometimes the "little guy with an appealing message" turns out to be not very good in practice, we've seen a few of those get elected. It also doesn't change the fact that even those little guys often have some stance on something I don't like. There is no perfect candidate.
The alternative to 'giving the little guy with an appealing message a chance' and 'one of two parties or chuck your vote into the trashcan' is to do away with democracy altogether - that's just math.
And yeah, there is no perfect candidate, but with a plurality (say, six) of political parties where none have the majority you can create a situation where they need to work together to get anything done, either forming coalitions of parties or negotiating between themselves. That allows a finer grained choice and the parties are forced to represent a wider range of interests.
I'll be the first one to say that Slovakian politics are a mess, but at least there's a choice - there's some 50 active political parties, 25 of which tried their hand in the last election, 6* of which managed to get into the parliament.
The parties available represented most everything, from communists, through pirates, Christian conservatives, libertarians, various flavors of socialists to nazis**.
* - a tad more complicated.
** - like, actual nazis, whos party members had a history of stuff like marching in uniforms
very reminiscent of a very awkward period of Slovakian history...
edit: Formating