2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Closed Primaries, At This Point In A Race, Make The Most Sense [View all]Karmadillo
(9,253 posts)sense. People get an idea they should be allowed to particpate in one of the party's primaries when the duopoly parties create conditions that make the creation of a viable third party nearly impossible.
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/nader.htm
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Richard Winger, who publishes Ballot Access News (www.ballot-access.org), does a formidable job of chronicling these outrages. Among the crippling provisions encountered during election 2000, consider these:
*To qualify for the ballot in Texas, a political party needed to collect 37,713 signatures in a seventy-five-day period; those who signed the petition could not have voted in the state's primary.
*In North Carolina, a party needed 51,324 signatures by May 15 of the election year. By statute, the petition has a must-carry phrase that reads "The signers of this petition intend to organize a new political party. . . ." To contemplate the chilling effect, simply ask yourself: When was the last time you signed something that would require you to commit to organizing a new political party?
*In Virginia, a candidate needs 10,000 signatures, four hundred from each congressional district. Circulators there can only petition in the county they live in and an adjacent county.
In Illinois, a new party needs 25,000 signatures to get on the ballot, while "established parties" only need 5,000 signatures.
*In Oklahoma, 36,202 signatures are required for a candidate to qualify for the ballot. With a population of 3,350,000, Oklahoma ranks 28th in the nation in population, but its total signature requirement is the fourth highest in the United States and the highest per capita in the country.
*Oklahoma (along with South Dakota) doesn't allow write-in votes, which strikes us as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Those are just the raw number barriers. But there are also excessive filing fees, early deadlines, and administrative hurdles. For example, in Pennsylvania, the state requires signature forms on special colored paper; it only provided four hundred forms though our volunteers needed more than two thousand. The state would not accept forms downloaded from the Internet. In West Virginia and Georgia, the filing fee is $4,000! In Michigan, petition forms had to be on odd-sized paper (8-1/2 by 13 inches).
In many states, our petitioners were harassed and threatened with arrest by officials with a shallow understanding of the First Amendment for circulating petitions in public places or taxpayer-financed parks and recreation areas. In Mississippi, the mayor of Tupelo stopped our petitioners from working in the town square at a festival on the Fourth of July. In Ohio, our petitioners were stopped from collecting signatures at a public market in West Cleveland. The reports from our volunteer petitioners were profiles in courage.
Of course, the Green Party is not the only one to face this challenge. The Libertarian Party the Reform Party, the Natural Law Party, and the Constitutional Party . . . all of the third parties have to go through this charade every time they seek to compete with the established duopolists. What happens when progress is made? The Democrats and Republicans who control the state assemblies and legislatures just run back into session to make the hurdles tougher.
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