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Third-Party and Independent Ballot Status
jsrjsr writes "Ballot Access News reports on the number of states where various candidates will be on the ballot. The site also contains a wealth of news about ballot access and other election-related issues."
Kang: "It's a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us."
Person in crowd: "I believe I'll vote for a third party candidate!"
Kodos: "Go ahead - throw your vote away!"
(Pan to Ross Perot in crowd punching though his hat)
***************
Kodos: "All hail President Kang!"
Marge: "I can't believe we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of."
Homer: "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
There is absolutely no way somebody other than Bush or Kerry is going to win in November... the American presidential election system just doesn't play that way.
Every state, plus Washington D.C., holds its own election that determines which set of electors will be sent to the electoral college. Almost all are in a winner-take-all format where the candidate with the most actual votes takes all of the state's electoral votes.
If a third party candidate is able to somehow upset both Bush and Kerry and take a state or two, they'd possibly pull things so that nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes. Realistically, a third candidate of the strength of the other two would result in an even 3-way split, which would most certainly promise that nobody can capture a majority. If that happens... the whole system turns on it head.
The electoral votes are tossed aside, and the newly elected House of Representatives gets to vote in a one-vote-per-state fashion to pick the new president.
In short, a third party candidate has no way to win the direct election, and can only hope to kick the election into the House's hands. However, if that third party doesn't have any representation in the House, they're going to crash there. In short, you can't start a new party at the presidency... you have to start building it with smaller offices before you can approach the Oval Office.
Isn't this what the new Slashdot politics subsite is for? I don't see how this any specific technological issues(e.g, Diebold) that justifies inclusion on the main page.
The Democrats have been harrasing Ralph Nader pretty bad. What they've done is they've formed a separate group called the United Progressives for Victory, and they are suing him everywhere that they can. They sue him in battleground states in order to keep him off the ballot, and they'll sue him in non-battleground states simply to harass him and deplete his resources. By forming a separate group, the United Progressives for Victory can be counter-attacked and sued out of exisxtence without putting the Democratic Party, itself, on the line.
Don't throw away your vote by voting Republican!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In an email conversation with Richard Winger (who runs Ballot Access News and invests all his energy and resources into the effort of being the central repository of a very complex subject) he noted the inherent hypocrisy of the parties.
The Republican party was very hastily assembled and won a big election (1860) in very short order (just a few months of organization on the national level.) Under todays hugely complex ballot laws, that would have been simply impossible. (Ballot access laws came about with the secret ballot. Prior to the secret ballot, the state didn't print ballots at all, and candidates did not register themselves with the state for an election. They just started campaigning, and people wrote the candidate's names down, or they brought candidate lists with them to the polling place and dropped them into the box. Essentially, *everyone* was a write-in candidate. The secret ballot made pre-printing necessary and therefore candidate pre-registration, and now we have a very technical system for keeping undesireables off the ballot.)
Winger does imply that there may be a federal ballot access system setup in the future, but I don't know how far off that is, nor how fair it would be for third parties.
The best reason to vote third party is to influence the policies of the two major parties. If the dems or reps see enough voters get behind a major third party issue, they will adjust their platforms to try and capture those votes.
Of course it is up to us to be an informed electorate and hold our leaders' feet to the fire when they fall down on their campaign promises. I am actually going to vote democrat for the first time in many years for exactly that reason... Bush's record is really rather horrible when bother to look past the spin and really check the facts.
The Bolachek Journals
I love how these so-called non-partisan laws are used to challenge 3-parties while the majors get their way. In Illinois these laws state qualifying names must be submitted by August 30. The Republican convention was held in Sept. If these laws were equally applied to the Majors, Dubya would not be on the ballot. I'm glad my Libertarians are on the ballot. They do a pretty good job at getting on all ballots. I don't delude myself that they will win because of it, but I hate when these laws only appear to apply to everyone but democrats and republicans.
This site is updated daily to give the predicted electoral vote counts - more informative than the overall popular vote totals. He also covers the Senate races and issues related to polling ingeneral. The site does have a somewhat pro-Kerry viewpoint, but it seems like the poll data is non-partisan ...
I frequently get asked why I "throw away" my vote by voting for a third-party candidate for President.
Sometimes people are nice about it, but too often it is an accusation. Apparently *I* am responsible for the fact that Al Gore did not get elected in 2000.
I have written on this subject before, but I wanted to cover some other information today.
One reason I vote for third party candidates is that they bring to the table issues that the major candidates may not normally mention. In order to try to sway third-party candidates, the major candidates will co-op some of the platform of smaller candidates. Had Al Gore paid more attention to *why* people were voting for Nader, he might have pulled in some more votes. Had he pulled in about 600 more votes in Florida, what would have happened?
From Open Debates: "Third-party candidates have introduced popular and groundbreaking issues that were eventually co-opted by the major parties, such as: the abolition of slavery, unemployment insurance, social security, child labor laws, public schools, public power, the direct election of senators, the graduated income tax, paid vacation, the 40-hour work week, the formation of labor unions, and democratic tools like the initiative, the referendum and the recall."
In related news - "The Commission on Presidential Debates may have violated federal election laws when it refused to allow any third-party presidential candidates into the debate halls to watch the 2000 presidential debates, a federal judge has ruled."
I would definitely suggest checking out the entire Open Debates sites. Pay special attention to the New section that has editorials from tons of newspapers calling for the inclusion of third-party candidates in the debates.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
As somebody who almost always votes Libertarian, I've done a lot of thinking, and I think that the real reason that 3rd party candidates will never have a chance in the US us due to the media. The media reports every 30 seconds what they think that the votign breakdown will be (ie: 45% Democrat, 51% Republican). The problem is that people always get into this "throwing away my vote" mentality. What needs to be done is polls need to be eliminated. All polls. They need to be made illegal. Voting in this country was designed to be a system in which each person votes for the person that they want to elect. Period. The media plays a very, very significant role in convincing people who they should vote for, and that just fucks everything up. As long as the media is reporting that the Democrats have this much vote, yada, yada, nobody is going to bother voting for a thrid party candidate because they believe that they will be "throwing away their vote". Ban public election polling.
Registered Libertarian.
I don't respond to AC's.
See, I find the above absolutely hilarious, since libertarians want to DE-regulate everything, and making a law that you can't poll people would be completely against their principles.
On a side note, the problem I have with libertarian ideology is the same problem that i have with communism ideology: It just doesn't account for human nature.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
As somebody who almost always votes Libertarian...
What needs to be done is polls need to be eliminated. All polls. They need to be made illegal.
Better take another pass over your Libertarian handbook. Start with index entries "Force, Initiation of" and "Government, Big."
..watching politics for a long time. The media coverage is vital. Whenever third parties and candidates get even close to normal coverage they do quite well. If they got equal coverage I'd bet we'd have huge numbers of third parties in every aspect of government at every level, but they CAN'T get coverage. This lasts a few cycles then a third party guy gets coverage, gets millions of votes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now I think they realise they should never cover third parties except for negative spin stories, well, like you see here.
The real biggee I remember was the national debates, you get some guy on there, and you can see third parties are viable. I'd blame the media and it's obvious brainwashing and propoganda efforts more than any other reason for the dominance of the R and D criminal cartel. And calling it a criminal cartel is the truth-they are. At the top, the mass media is owned by a handful of billionaires, so you will only see media reports that perpetuate their own corporate blow dried alleged "candidates". And since the rise of independent press and the internet, they realise their monopoly on info was threatened, so they had to come up with some way to insure the corporate party candidate gets in always, hence blackbox voting.
People in the USA need to wake up that they live in a dictatorship, that their vote itself comes pre-wasted for them. The only wasted vote are all the ones cast thinking that it will make a difference, because it won't, the corporate party "won" a long time ago and now runs bi annual political melodrama TV fiction shows to keep people amused and faked out.
I mean, c'mon, two skull and bones white male connected elite globalist millionaires as the "choices"? How blatant does it have to get?
I live in Minnesota. Wanna try and convince me that voting for a third part throws away my vote?
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
The major flaw was that national elections are held on a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all basis. Which means that if three or more candidates compete in a race, it's virtually guaranteed that somebody with less than a majority of the vote will end up winning political power. The result of this flaw is non-democratic minority rule, instead of the democratic ideal of majority rule.
... The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished..."
A good example of this happened in the 2002 election in my state of Vermont, where the Republican candidates became Governor and Lieutenant Governor with 45 percent and 41 percent of the vote respectively because each had more votes than his Democratic or Progressive opponents alone. (Example: Republican Brian Dubie - 41%; Democrat Peter Shumlin - 32%; Progressive Anthony Pollina - 25%. The Republican "won.") The majority of Vermont voters selected liberal or progressive candidates, but conservatives are in charge of the state - the exact anti-democratic result that gave some of the Framers nightmares.
James Madison was the most outspokenly worried about this. In the 1787 Federalist #10, he goes into a lengthy discussion of the danger of "factions" - one aspect of what we today call political parties - emerging. First he puts a good face on the problem, suggesting that the new Constitution will solve the "violence" done to democracy by factions. But in the next sentence, he admits his fear that he and the other Framers had not truly solved the problem of what would happen if "factions" were to emerge.
"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union [based on the Constitution], none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction," wrote Madison. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.
The problem was that if factions were to emerge as political parties, it would mean there could only be two of them, for if more than two parties emerged then the majority of people would almost always remain unrepresented, while the most well-organized minority would end up ruling.
Madison concluded by saying he felt the Constitution he and Hamilton were promoting with the Federalist Papers was the best solution they could come up with to solve the problem of factions.
But, as he noted, the constitution wasn't perfect: "The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger [of factions] on this side, as was wished and expected." His only solution was to beg Americans not to form factions.
Although George Washington was soon thereafter elected unanimously and by acclimation, America's second presidential election (won by John Adams) almost immediately led to the creation of Madison's feared "factions" in the form of Vice-President Thomas Jefferson's "Democratic-Republican" party (today called the "Democratic Party"). Ever since then, we've largely been a two-party nation - because our Constitution is written in a way that causes anything else to result in the least democratic outcome to an election.
Most of the rest of the world, however, has learned from our mistake and taken a different path.
Of the 86 other "fully democratic" nations in the world (according to the UN), only a few like Greece and Australia had repeated our mistake, although Australia solved the problem with a national variation on what in America is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where you select your first, second, third, etc., preference among candidates, and if there's no majority winner, the "instant runoff" is instantl
I usually vote 3rd party as well but not this year. Only one candidate.the President, will take it to the Terrorists. The stakes are to high to vote on any other "issue".
Fighting terrorism with fullscale war is like trying to perform surgery using a sledge hammer. Yes, you can remove some unhealthy tissue that way, but you end up doing so much damage that the
patient usually dies on the table.
The way you fight terrorists is by infiltrating them, undermining them, making small surprise raids in the middle of night. You work to turn the local populations against them, turn one group against another. Full-on war and occupation comes with inevitable civilian collateral damage, which creates an ideal recruiting ground for the terrorists. Russia has seen exactly this happen in Chechnya. They have been so aggressive within Chechyna that it has turned much of the local population against them, and driven the terrorists to even more radical behavior. We are also seeing that happen in Iraq. It is no accident that anti-american sentiment is at an all time high around the world, and last year was a record year for terrorism activity.
Bush needs to start using the scalpels of diplomacy and intelligence work and put away the hammer of war. Perhaps if he did that, we would actually catch Osama.
Cheers,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals