Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

By Theresa Amato, The New Press. Posted July 7, 2009.

As one of the few DC residents on the Nader campaign in 2004, and with just a few days to go before the DC deadline to collect valid signatures to put Ralph Nader and Peter Miguel Camejo on the ballot, I decided to help out in the sweltering heat to get a taste of what the valiant circulators were experiencing in trying to collect signatures for the Nader campaign.  

I was asking this question—“Are you registered to vote?”—because if you run for president as a third-party or independent candidate (a candidate who is running as the nominee of several minor parties or no party at all), you are forced to comply with an unimaginably arcane set of rules that are different in each of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the three territories. The two-party-controlled state legislatures pass laws and the election administrators—usually through a board of elections or a secretary of state’s office—apply the laws and establish the regulations that determine how a candidate gets to be on the ballot. The Supreme Court has said that this process cannot be “overly burdensome” and that the regulations, if they are severe, have to be “narrowly tailored” to meet state interests because these state rules butt up against a candidate’s competing First Amendment constitutional rights to petition, to speak, and to participate in free association. Our goal in DC was to collect 5,000 signatures to meet a 3,600 signatures state requirement. If DC were a battleground state, we would have aimed for between double or triple the signature requirements to inoculate against multiple efforts—by Democratic partisans or partisan officials—to strike Nader and Camejo from the ballot in the states where the vote could be close, as described in Chapter 4. So when you need to collect 5,000 signatures of registered voters in the District of Columbia, or in any state, what do you do? Like a good scout, I first made sure I was wearing the appropriate outfit—comfortable shoes and clothing that made it less likely I would be taken for a nut or a mugger! Armed with clipboards, petitions, campaign buttons, and pens, I went to a metro exit, figuring that this would be a very highly trafficked place. Rookie mistake! Of course it is highly trafficked—but with people who live in Maryland or Virginia and thus are not registered to vote in DC, if they even know where or whether they are registered to vote. 

For the 2004 election, approximately 142 million people, or 72 percent of the voting-age citizen population in the United States, were registered to vote, which was the highest since 1992 and up 12.5 million people since 2000.5 So even assuming everyone you meet on the street lives in the state in which you are circulating (an unwise assumption in a place as cosmopolitan as DC), you are already starting with the significant disadvantage of having 28 percent of people not registered. On the order of 15 percent of the eligible voters, or more than 9 million Americans, also move from one state to another each year, and 40 million total move (the difference being those moving in state), making it difficult for both the voters and the state to keep track of voter eligibility in any particular local jurisdiction. And if you were registered at one address and moved, you may no longer be registered to vote, even if you moved in the same jurisdiction. Modern-day mobility, coupled with the lack of ability by the states to maintain accurate voter registration databases, creates registration chaos. Finally, factor in the general lack of citizen interest in voting—only 64 percent of the citizen voting-age population turned out in the 2004 presidential election, which was higher than the 60 percent in 2000—and you will have some sense of the challenge third-party and independent candidates face just getting over the ballot hurdle. Even in 2004, billed as a “high-stakes” presidential election, “more than one in three eligible voters did not participate.” Now add the aversion of most people on the street to being confronted by anyone with a clipboard.  

So on the hot August nights I was out collecting, I tried to find registered DC voters willing to sign our campaign’s petition. The first thing I noticed is that as a society we have evolved from congregating on the street corners to discuss whether to take on King George III and subject ourselves to taxes to blogging on the Internet and reading “Politico.” People are more likely to be in front of their computers posting a critique or making a YouTube video than plotting a Boston Tea Party. Indeed, a third of the people I encountered could not even be physically approached because they had on headphones or were talking on their cell phones. Unlike candidates in Britain and most other countries, third-party and independent candidates in the United States have to spend substantial percentages of their time and resources petitioning their fellow Americans just to get on the ballot. And if you are not on the ballot, your candidacy does not exist. No ballot access, no votes. 

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Theresa Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in both 2000 and 2004—and the only woman to have managed two high-profile American presidential campaigns outside the two major parties. A graduate of Harvard University and NYU School of Law, she is the founder of the Citizen Advocacy Center in suburban Chicago and a public interest lawyer. Amato lives with her family in Oak Park, Illinois.

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