Barr Sues Over McCain's, Obama's Presence on Texas Ballot

corbettw writes "Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline."

Comments

I hope they're removed,

[Antony-Kyre]

but I hope they are allowed to run as write-in. Assuming the summary is true.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Workaphobia]

I'd settle for a voting system that isn't as mathematically flawed as multiple-candidate-single-vote/majority-required.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree, but they absolutely will be placed on the ballot. Rules mean nothing to these people. The political parties themselves *are* the government, so they are above the law.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[billcopc]

Careful what you wish for... if things keep getting uglier down there, people just might move. There are plenty of other countries that treat their citizens like criminals, deny them basic rights, detain them indefinitely without a trial (nor formal arrest).

Usually people are trying to get out of those countries, which is why the US and Canada presently enjoy a very diverse cultural landscape. People over here are used to the easy life. If that goes sour, they will tolerate much less abuse than our Asian and middle-eastern friends, and will head straight for Western Europe.

20 years from now, you might hear the French and Germans complain "these American immigrants are stealing our jobs!"

Re:I hope they're removed,

[mpe]

Or maybe something crazy like, oh... lets see... one set of laws that covers how federal elections should be run, maybe passed at a federal level.

AFAIK there are no federal elections in the US. On the other hand if the US Government was creating such (pointless) laws they might be too busy to do worst things.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Bazman]

Single Transferrable Vote is what you want. Although it'll take some explaining to some of the populace. So offer alternatives.

At the voting stations, have two lines, a fast track and a slow track.

In the fast track, you get a ballot paper with the usual STV instructions - place a 1 next to your first choice candidate, a 2 in your second choice candidate, and so on until you have no more preferences between the remaining candidates.

In the slow track, a computer screen. It says "Which of these do you want to win?" and a list of candidates. The voter selects one.

Then it says "If that guy doesn't win, which of these would you like to win?" followed by a list of the remaining candidates and a further option "They're all as bad as each other".

Re:I hope they're removed,

[profplump]

If by "interesting" you mean "sad" then I agree wholeheartedly.

Frankly I don't think you should be allowed to vote if you can't explain the general process of the election and the duties of the office with 90% accuracy. Instead of jury duty, let's require people to take (or test out of) civics courses.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[LaskoVortex]

Or maybe something crazy like, oh... lets see... one set of laws that covers how federal elections should be run, maybe passed at a federal level. You know, like other civilized countries have.

That would be great in the United States of Pretendland. But in the United States of America, you have a federation of states and this federation has an electoral college. The states get to make their own laws about how they assign their electoral college votes. Since Texas has made those laws they should be obeyed. We see similar appeals for obyeing the law when it comes to not smoking pot or not killing people in cold blood or not drinking and driving. We call this concept the "Rule of Law".

Re:I hope they're removed,

[jandersen]

I don't know that it is fair to call it a loss. I realize that it is always annoying and inconvenient to have to accomodate the needs of others in the name of cooperation, but this is very much in the future of the world; it has to be if we are to not just survive, but create a great future. With the internet, globalisation, international travel etc, there are simply too many issues that can only be tackled by international cooperation. We are slowly approaching a situation where the idea of an actual international government becomes the natural thing.

Both the EU and the US are examples that this can actually be done. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course, but I'm confident that we will get there.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Pikoro]

How about everyone rates the people running for president as their first, second, and third choice by marking as such. 3 points for first pick, 2 points for second pick, 1 point for third pick, 0 points for not picked.

Then we tally up all 3 and see who wins.

This would sure even things out a whole lot more I would think. It would force candidates to campaign outside their party boundries in order to get the popular vote.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[dzfoo]

Weren't the northern states, in the old system, capable of declining trade with slave-enabling states? If so, this would have affected their economic viability in a substantial way; and coerced them, eventually, to only be allowed trade amongst themselves. Thus, their potential for economic growth would have been limited. This seems particularly unsustainable to me, and eventually could have prompted the slave-enabling states to change their ways. This is not unlike imposing economic sanctions on hostile foreign countries--except that they would be bretheren, and geographically bound, thus offering a higher incentive.

I don't personally subscribe to the idea that "them states had slaves, they were e-veel, so they must be stopped immediately!!!!0ne" justification for the Civil War. Many things happen in the lead to it, most importantly the cessation of some states, which--for evident reasons--could not be tolerated by the Union. But some of these events were sparked by the chain reaction of the Union attempting to impose control on each (hitherto) soverign state.

As the grandfather post says, the Federal Government wanted to excert control over the individual states, it went to war to this end, and it won. And we have to live now with the historical consequenes of this event--for better or for worse. Our nation change significantly hence, in spirit and vision--again, for better or for worse.

          -dZ.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[electrictroy]

In most cases, like my own "Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", it's just a name. But originally the name meant exactly what it said: Everybody shared the same wealth, which in colonial society meant "common sharing of food". That style was quickly abandoned because it was discovered that some lazy people refused to work in the field, and yet they still got the reward (free food) off the backs of their industrious neighbors.

Now my state operates on the idea of individual wealth - you work, you keep what you earn. Wealth is kept separately for each person or family, except in a few cases like the Dole for the homeless.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Sique]

But also with range voting you can get a less popular candidate winning. If he has not many but loyal followers who give him a 9 and 0 to everyone else, and the other candidate has many more followers, but they will give him 7s and 8s, and 2s and 3s to the other, then in the end the candidate the majority disappoves still manages to win. The disparity can get worse if there are more than two candidates running.

Lets assume 30 voters for three candidates.

A gets 9 from his 10 supporters, who give 0 to all other candidates.
B gets 7 from his 10 supporters, but they give 2 to all other candidates.
C gets 7 from his 10 supporters, who give 4 to B and only 1 to A.

So A is heavily unpopular with everyone exept his own supports, and he gets 120 votes. B is popular with his own supporters, but also the fans of C will agree with him. He gehts 110 votes. C is definitely unpopular, but the supportes of B would rather have him than A.

But still A wins.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[hey!]

If neither candidate can run on the ballot OR as a write in, that would almost certainly precipitate a nationwide constitutional crisis.

To win the Presidency in a one on one race, a candidate needs to get 270 electoral votes, because there are a total of 538 votes in the Electoral College. Texas has the 34 electoral votes, meaning that if the electors from Texas were barred from voting for either candidate, Obama would almost certainly win a plurality.

Except -- the electors aren'tspecifically bound by the constitution to vote for anybody. Theoretically an elector, while elected standing for candidate A, can change his mind and vote for B. About half the states have laws which punish "faithless electors", although the constitutionality of these laws have never been tested. It's doubtful that they are constitutional.

If Obama wins 270 electoral votes, it won't matter. But if he wins 235 electoral votes it won't matter (because McCain will have 370), although that is unlikely in the extreme.

If we have anything in between, we have a constitutional crisis. What would be clear is that had the will of Texans been honored according to how the system was supposed to work, then McCain should have won. If some TX electors acting on this theory votes for him, then he will win, but the legitimacy of this win will be questioned by around half of Americans who voted for Obama -- possibly more than half if Obama wins the popular vote. If not enough TX electors vote for McCain to put him over the top, the people who voted for McCain will not recognize the legitimacy of the elections. If each candidate gets exactly 252 votes (I haven't checked whether this is possible mathematically), then the election goes to the House, which will give the Presidency to Obama.

In any case, in any of these crisis scenarios, the reasonable outcome would be for McCain to get the presidency, because that reflects the will of the peoples as it would have resulted had the proper procedures been followed. But no matter who wins the presidency, the presidency would be deeply weakened -- a happy result for the Libertarians, but potentially disastrous for the country as we navigate some pretty rough waters ahead with a president distracted by legitimacy questions.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[barnaby-jones]

I don't think the B supporters would do that. Every voter will maximize the influence of his own vote. I say the following is the smart way for each of the supporters to vote:

A gets 9 from his 10 supporters, who give 0 to all other candidates.

B gets 9 from his 10 supporters, but they give 0 to all other candidates.

C gets 9 from his 10 supporters, who give 5 to B and only 0 to A.

A gets 90

B gets 140

C gets 90

B has the support of C-voters and is the only candidate to cross party lines, so he wins.

Each voter has the power to maximize the influence of his own vote. It is an equal power.

Re:I hope they're removed,

[Skjellifetti]

Why wouldn't all the southern states just say "Ok, great, we'll come back to the Union and keep our slaves, just like you said we could." if that was "the cause of the war"?

For the simple reason that there were too many Union abolitionists demanding emancipation. The slave holding states were not going to be allowed to keep their slaves. This does not mean that everyone in the North was in favor of abolition or wanted to go to war to end it. The abolitionists had strong arguments among their factions over the best means to the end (compare the Quakers to John Brown) but overall, the abolitionists were certainly a very large and very vocal majority in the North. Harriet Beecher Stowe's book about the evils of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, sold 300,000 copies in the North before the Civil War and the Republican Party was formed in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act that would have allowed the expansion of slavery into Kansas. The abolition of slavery was a question of when and how, not a question of if.

The fact is, the winners write the history books.

There are too many Southern histories of the Civil War for that statement to have any meaning.

Re: electoral college

[Antony-Kyre]

I am in favour of the electoral college. I think I'd rather secede than to abolish it. Then again, I am for states' rights.

Re:Hahaha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we all know activists aren't idiots who know nothing other than the contents of TV ads.

Re:Great for Obama

[beaverbrother]

This should be about following the law. If Obama supporters turn this into a partisan thing, then it will be Michigan and Florida all over again.
Obama's stance there was to let the party decide, because the candidates really shouldn't push for election regulations in their favor.
Obama's stance here will likely be to let the state decide, because it is a state matter and candidates can't bend the law to keep a party in power.
Obviously both positions favor him, so he will get flamed for it, but they are also both the right thing to do.
Here the libertarians are right. If parties can bend the rules to keep themselves in power, you don't have a true democracy.

Silly Rabbit...

[gbulmash]

What if Florida or Ohio decided to pass a law saying that the name of the official major party nominees had to be submitted 180 days before the election?

A reasonable advance notice to give time to prepare and print ballots is cool, but if Texas was forced to remove the major party candidates from the ballot, it would be like saying that any state, at a whim, could determine a national nomination deadline by setting a ballot deadline.

IANAL, but I think Obama and McCain could raise a pretty valid constitutional challenge to it that might end up creating a national guideline for ballot deadlines, imposing yet another federal regulation.

Re: electoral college

[eldepeche]

The current system is worse than mob rule. Why do we have huge subsidies on corn and soy? Iowa is a swing state. Why did we bail out American auto makers in the 70's? Michigan is a swing state. Why do we have steel tariffs? Pennsylvania is a swing state. Why do we have sugar tariffs? Florida is a swing state. Maybe we would have some kind of national urban/metropolitan policy on land use or transportation if anyone cared what people in California or greater New York thought about anything.

Spell check?

[martyb]

Hey, this is awesome! Screw electronic voting. Screw pre-printed ballots in general! Just think -- if candidates were forced to rely on a write-in only process, voting participation would drop like a stone because the average American couldn't be bothered. Only the activists would show up, and the polls wouldn't be tainted by idiots who know nothing other than the contents of TV ads.(emphasis added)

That could be quite interesting! Here are my predictions on the names of some of the write-in candidates:

• Barrack Obama
• Barak Obama
• Bareack Obama
• Barack O'bama
• Barack Omama
• Barack O. Bama
• John McKain
• John MacCain
• Jon McCain
• Johann McCain
• John McCane
• John Mack Cain

As not even one of the above is the name of a candidate, all Bob Barr needs is for more people to be able to spell his name correctly than they could the other candidates.

For a prank, Bob Barr could have a few people at each polling place who carried signs encouraging people to vote for the above, misspelled candidates. That couldn't possibly work. Could it?

Re:Great for Obama

[Neoprofin]

An interesting thing happened, and I don't know if it ever made it to /. A political group tried to get it enacted that Texas electoral votes would be distributed proportionately rather than all or nothing to take advantage of Texas' large urban areas (the ones that elected your 13 democrat congressmen) effectively turning Texas into a "purple state". I hear it ended right about the time someone threatened to do the same to California and destroy every Democrat presidential campaign for the next decade.(Or because it'd be hard to get something like that pushed through by Republicans in Texas.)

Pretty much a side note.

Take them the heck off the ballot.

[taliesin1077]

Actually, Barr is having to fight in a couple states for ballot access, despite having made the requisite number of signatures by the deadline specified by the states. Connecticut might be one? I'm pretty sure Virginia is as well. However, the Dems and the Reps, despite having missed the timeline, (and I've seen copies of the paperwork...they missed it) are granted ballot access carte blanche.

Interesting opportunity for the dems

[Urkki]

If Obama is almost certain to lose Texas, how about he admits the error and doesn't run in Texas at all? So it would be McCain versus Barr. A lot of McCain voters might not bother to vote 'cos they're sure to win, while some Dems just might go vote for Barr, just to oppose McCain. So Barr might have a remote chance of winning against McCain in that case, due to low voter turn-out.

But the main point for dems would be, that if McCain then wins the entire election by small margin and becomes the president, he would arguably again be a republican president who got elected illegally... That might give some nice political ammunition for the next 4 years.

I mean, if Barak is sure to lose Texas anyway, what do they have to lose?

Re:Link to the texas code:

[Anonymous Coward]

If I read that correctly (I am not a lawyer), then half of Barr's complaint should be legally valid and half should not be.

McCain could not have filed in time, and so clearly does not (according to the law) belong on the ballot.

Barr complains that Obama filed, but said before the vote was tallied that he had already been nominated. However as I read the law, the requirement is that the paperwork be filed and certified by the party's state chair. There is stated no requirement that the party's internal procedures have actually been followed in full. Only that they be certified. Since it appears that the party's state chair did, in fact, file and certify the paperwork, Obama should be on the ballot.

My guess as to what will actually happen here is that a judge will get the case, will rule that Barr has no standing to bring the lawsuit, and will promptly throw the case out of court. Leaving unresolved the question of whether the candidates should, in fact, not be on the ballot. Since nobody can be found with both standing and the desire to sue, they will be on the ballot, and McCain will carry Texas.

I predict that because this is the only decision that the judge can come to which is consistent with the law and the facts, and will not get the judge lynched.

Re:They'll meet half way, Remove Obama, Leave McCa

[StrategicIrony]

It has nothing to do with counting issues. It has to do with proportional representation.

At the time it was created, Delaware got 3 votes, Virginia got 10 votes.

However, Virginia had something like 30x the population.

What it did was give small states more representation in choosing the president.

Currently, the numbers are inflated. Wyoming still only gets 3 votes, but California gets 55.

If we deflated it back down so California got 15, then Florida would have 9 and Wyoming would still have 3 and suddenly, we would have a number more useful swing states.

Frankly, I prefer the concept of electoral college, but I think I'd almost favor state implementing a district election system, similar to senate seats, for electoral votes, allowing an even spread based on population clusters...

I DO NOT like a "popular vote". It feels too much like a big federalist government. I don't believe in an overwhelming federal goverment. I would prefer to go back more toward a coalition of independent states.

Re:if you support third party candidates

[mr_matticus]

It assumes rational self-interest, which in turn relies on intelligent, informed decisionmakers. It relies on self-regulation, which is demonstrably ineffective (there is no such thing as environmental protectionism in libertarianism).

It is the political science equivalent of "the math works, assuming a spherical, frictionless cow". It is an academic model suffering from the same impossibility of implementation as communism. It only works given flawless conditions, which is to say that it does not work.

It offers no mechanism to correct imbalances that inevitably arise in society, and it places ideological integrity ahead of pragmatic effectiveness. It cannot adapt to the conflict that "maximum personal liberty" is nonlinear and NP-complete unless you live in a single-issue society. Perhaps most vexingly, it supposes a government which protects private interests and thus has nothing resembling a check on corporate power, despite academic protests to the contrary. What is best for the individual is sometimes in conflict with what is best for society, or for the world at large and libertarianism doesn't accept that as a compelling justification. What's more, it relies on acting in long-term interests, which we have habitually not done, even in the presence of regulation, and instead of solving the free rider problem, libertarians simply deny it as a factor.

You can make strides to pull issues and legislation in a "libertarian" direction, but the libertarian ideal can never be realized. You cannot have a libertarian society.

happened in 2004 too

[downix]

Bush failed to file on time to be listed in Alabama. Technically Alabamas electorals were to be the next highest canidate, which happened to be Kerry. Oh, and lookee here, with Alabama, Kerry suddenly won 2004...

If Barr wins this, it could turn the results in prior elections into disputes as well. I wish him goddess speed! 8)

Re:Not entirely true

[zsau]

How a country was created is irrelevant to whether or not a state is a federation, or how elections should be conducted. Australia, for instance, is a federation with (at present) a federal election law for federal elections. Seven colonies were created over a period of some hundred years (chronologically, New South Wales, Tasmania as Van Diemen's Land, Western Australia as the Swan River Colony, South Australia, New Zealand, Victoria and Queensland). At the end of this process, an extra colony was created (called the Commonwealth of Australia) with some powers transferred from six of the seven colonies, and other powers transferred from London. The first election in this new colony was done using state electoral laws, but one of the first laws passed was an electoral law. Over the next fifty to ninety years, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, and the other colonies became increasingly independent of London. Into which category does Australia fall?

Belgium is a federation of sorts, and one I don't fully understand. The federation is a relatively recent creation, but Flanders and Wallonia are powerful today, and very much culturally (and linguistically) different. But would you accept it as comparable?

Switzerland is probably another good example that you'd accept; their cantons come from relatively independent states in days when travel was a lot slower than it is today. I have no idea about their electoral law, aside from the fact that they have a massive number of referenda.