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

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

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Our current, deserved obsession with election mechanics has served to obscure many more fundamental problems. Just because the 2008 election margin was not razor-thin does not mean these problems have been fixed. Everything I came to witness or experience in the Nader campaigns in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections says distinctly that our electoral system does not work for supporters of third parties and independents, but it also doesn’t work well for voters of the two major parties, either. The mainstream media is talking about this at the most rudimentary level, highlighting our collective inability to count and record. But the problems are not limited to getting a better abacus. This may be hard to accept if you share, as I did, our collective bedrock belief that we live in the most advanced democracy on the planet.  

Whether you can vote—and whether your vote counts—depends primarily on where you live. Whether candidates appear on your ballot, and in what order they appear, is conditioned on where you live. How much your vote counts compared to others also depends on where you live. Yes, your vote is conditional. It is based on your location in your state and among states. In Chapter 1 we discussed the as-yet-unfixed problems with voter registration rolls—purged and inaccurate as they are from state to state. Here, I set forth a brief look at additional factors—the Electoral College, the mechanics of vote counting, write-in votes, military and overseas voting, absentee ballots and early voting, provisional ballots, and recounts, because as a country we need to get to the point where we say that where you live in the United States should not affect whether and how your vote counts for president of the United States. 

Though I encountered these issues in the context of whether a voter for a third-party or independent candidate could get his or her vote counted accurately, timely, and fairly, the problems, albeit to a lesser degree, exist also for two-party voters. All voters should demand more federalization to our federal elections to eliminate the arbitrariness of geography on the value of an individual’s vote.

Click here to buy a copy of Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

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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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