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

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

In the political as in the economic arena, the lack of competition produces inefficiencies, and these are most pronounced when the two market leaders collude to keep others out. How many more election cycles will it take until real progress is made on some of our more outstanding problems, such as access to health care or global warming? Why must we suffer through these inefficiencies of a political marketplace when no competitor is allowed to tell the reigning two-party front-runners that their policies have failed? What cost has it been to the American people, not to mention the Iraqis, that neither major party in the presidential debates or on prime-time news would stand up and oppose the Iraq war in the 2004 election, or that both major party candidates supported a massive government bailout in 2008? 

Because the structural barriers against third parties and independents are numerous, this all adds up to a self-fulfilling prophecy: third-party candidates do poorly in large part because people think that they will. Moreover, third-party scholars show how the barriers, the electoral outcomes, the lack of judicial rectification, the lack of knowledge of American history, and the media have all confirmed this “prevalent belief . . . that the two-party system is a sacred arrangement. . . . Third party candidates are seen as disrupters of the American two-party system.” Shut out from the bipartisan political cartel in our country, third parties and independents are labeled erroneously as “spoilers” of a fossilized, entrenched incumbency class—instead of as “defenders” of the right to freedom of electoral choice in the United States. 

In Third Parties in America, Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus conclude: “A citizen can vote for a major party candidate with scarcely a moment’s thought or energy. But to support a third party challenger, a voter must awaken from the political slumber in which he ordinarily lies, actively seek out information on a contest whose outcome he cannot affect, reject the socialization of his political system, ignore the ridicule and abuse of his friends and neighbors, and accept the fact that when the ballots are counted, his vote will never be in the winner’s column. Such levels of energy are witnessed only rarely in American politics.” I hope to demonstrate in a kind of gruesome detail typically absent from academic books how difficult the two major parties have made it for third parties and independents to compete in the electoral process, from ballot access barriers and biased deadlines to partisan election administration, elimination litigation, dense election regulations, and faux presidential “debates.” Throughout this book, I explain the many hurdles third parties and independent candidates must overcome just to have a chance to offer their candidacies in our current electoral process, and I ask why we treat our third parties and independents this way when most of the rest of the civilized world has embraced multiparty democracy. 

“Are You Registered to Vote?” 

In August 2004, on the steamy streets of Washington, DC, I found out firsthand that asking whether someone is registered to vote may be one of the more complicated questions in the United States. Registration to vote in a U.S. federal election is not a federal requirement. We let the states dictate the terms of registration. Thus you don’t have to be registered to vote in North Dakota, the only state with no registration requirements, but in all the other states you do, by state-imposed criteria. In most states, including North Dakota, you must be a resident at least thirty days before the election. As of 2007, seven states would let the voter register on the same day as the election. Some states limit eligibility because of criminal status. All states now require you to be at least eighteen and a U.S. citizen, though this was not always the case. 

In Canada, citizens are automatically registered to vote in a National Register, continuously updated by the federal government, but citizens may opt out and are protected by privacy laws. In the United States, however, all of our voters have to “opt in.” We have opt-out policies in the commercial sector for phone solicitations (the Do Not Call List) and privacy violations, but opt-in policies in the public sector for the civic act of voting. 

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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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