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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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HOW COME THERE AREN’T MORE THIRD PARTIES FIELDING CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT?

The short answer is because the Republicans and Democrats set things up to make it impossible for anyone else…...
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In addition to ballot access laws, consider campaign finance rules….John Stossel profiled Ada Fisher, a woman attempting a low-budget, longshot run for Congress in North Carolina with a staff of volunteers. She found it impossible to comply with the election law without hiring a team of lawyers — which of course, she couldn’t afford. Written in small print, single spaced, the federal election code spanned one-and-a-half football fields. Eventually, Fisher and her volunteer campaign treasurer were personally fined $10,000 by the FEC for filling late reports.

Stossel then cut to University of Missouri Professor Jeff Milyo, who ran an experiment in which he asked dozens of college-educated people to try to fill out various campaign finance forms and applications. Of the more than 200 people Milyo tested, Stossel reported, “every one of them violated the law.” One participant added, “I’d rather not participate in the political process if it means I have to go through the nonsense I went through today.”

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Nice, right? You take part in the electoral process, attempting to become a “citizen legislator”, and the impossibility of the forms lead to a personal fine of $10,000.00. And you’re still asking why more people don’t take up the challenge…....?
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What about those ballot access requirements? Well, Bob Barr, for the Libertarians, found out about this the hard way…..
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In Connecticut, state officials initially said the Barr campaign came up about 500 names short of the 7,500 signatures required to put Barr’s name on the ballot. They later acknowledged that they had made an addition error. Barr was only 321 names shy of the minimum. The state then admitted that state officials had actually lost 119 pages of signatures—almost certainly enough to put Barr over the top. Nevertheless, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Barr would not be on the ballot, citing testimony from Connecticut officials that it would be “nearly impossible” to reprint the ballots to include him.

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It’s bad enough that even the major parties don’t always keep track…..but that doesn’t seem to matter, at least in some states:
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Meanwhile, in Texas, the tables were turned. Both the Republican and Democratic parties somehow missed that state’s deadline to include Barack Obama and John McCain on the Texas ballot. Barr’s campaign sued, noting the equal protection problems with allowing the two major parties to skirt campaign rules while holding third party candidates to the letter of the law. Barr was right — Obama and McCain should have been kept off the Texas ballot. But Barr’s suit was dismissed by the Texas Supreme Court without comment. Apparently, the Democratic and Republican parties are, to borrow a now-tired phrase, “too big to fail.” They’re allowed to break the rules.

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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/06 at 07:40 PM

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