Others on the Ballot Seek Attention

By MARK ANDERSON

Long before “dimpled chads,” universalized mail-in elections and suspicious looking electronic voting machines with secretive vote-counting software marred the electoral landscape—causing the people to wonder whether the election process is skewed beyond repair—we’ve had a “duopoly,” which is the false reality that the media presents when it claims that only Democrats and Republicans are “legitimate” for serving in public office.

Thus, decade after decade, the hapless American voter—having been told that their entire political universe consists of “red versus blue”—has been given a different kind of “vote fraud” that no one talks about.

This species of fraud surfaces whenever you receive a ballot that includes several candidates of whom you’ve never heard, let alone knowing anything about them. Over the years, these candidates have come from the Libertarian Party, Constitution Party, Green Party, Reform Party, Natural Law Party and several others which float candidates every election cycle for state boards of education, county boards, state legislatures, some township and city boards, and for the US House, US Senate and the presidency.

And the first time most of us hear anything about them is when we go to vote and discover, as was the case in 2004, for example, that about seven presidential candidates of some repute were on the ballot in a number of states.

That’s why it caught my eye that the organization Free and Equal conducted a second debate featuring alternative presidential candidates on Oct. 8 in Denver. All these debates are livestreamed on the Internet and archived at www.freeandequal.org.

The Oct. 8 debate, for the record, featured, at a minimum (based on who had accepted the invitation to debate as of Oct. 6) the American Solidarity Party’s Brian Carroll, Independent Brock Pierce, the Constitution Party’s Don Blankenship, the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, as well as Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Furthermore, both sessions of Free and Equal’s lengthy first debate were posted online as of this writing.

And—try though they might—these candidates and other alternative candidates cannot get even an honorable mention from the monopolistic corporate press, nor will the esteemed Commission on Presidential Debates, which every election cycle gives us those red-versus-blue “boxing matches,” including the rather abrasive Trump-Biden debates, acknowledge their existence.

Yet, according to Ballotpedia.org, Howie Hawkins and running mate Angela Nicole Walker, as well as Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen and running mate Spike Cohen, qualified to appear on enough state ballots to conceivably win a majority of at least 270 electoral votes.

If you found the first Trump-Biden debate somewhat entertaining, but ultimately uninspiring, it should bother you that the “reds” and the “blues” appear to be eternal opponents, yet their respective party machines have a lock on the system to keep other “interlopers” out, which makes it exceedingly hard for so-called “minor party” candidates to even get on the ballot in the first place—let alone get elected, regardless of the office they’re seeking.

Notably, Free and Equal’s first debate, before the field apparently narrowed, featured 18, yes 18, candidates. The situation is interesting. For example, Mark Stewart, who says he’s a Democrat on paper, espouses a “libertarian” philosophy and said he’s open to serving as someone’s vice presidential candidate. He noted he would “smash the Democratic party from within” and send its socialists to a socialist party, where he feels they belong.

Moreover, the Life and Liberty Party, the Transhumanist Party, and several other parties (and, in some cases, more than one candidate from the same party) participated in that first debate.

Although some may argue that having so many choices could water down elections too much, at least when it comes to electing a president, others say that the current presidential election process, which Free and Equal founder Christina Tobin calls highly divisive by its very nature, forces most people to vote against whomever they despise the most, rather than who they’re really for.

And while there are exceptions to that, it’s clearly food for thought—as is the reality that our “democratic republic” clearly is not very democratic. In fact, the words “shadow dictatorship” probably qualify as a descriptor.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020

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