A “Two-Option” Democracy

The Article: US elections: Why does the world’s greatest democracy offer just two choices? by Mark Mckinnon in The Telegraph.

The Text: The gauntlet was thrown down in duelling online videos last week. President Barack Obama’s campaign compared presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney to a blood-sucking, job-destroying vampire while he headed Bain Capital, a private equity firm. Romney quickly parried with a brutally effective video telling the heart-wrenching stories of just three of the 23 million unemployed Americans in the Obama economy.

The 2012 election campaign season is still young; the battle will grow only more bruising. And voters will become increasingly turned off. But, in America, we get only two choices, and often are left voting for what we believe to be the lesser of two evils.

Friends in Europe and elsewhere often lament their own forms of government which foster countless parties and voices, and create much noise and chaos. Ironically, in America, which we like to argue is the greatest democracy in the world, we are limited to just two choices: a Republican or a Democrat.

And voters are tiring of it. Some 40 per cent of Americans today identify themselves as political Independents – a record. Just 29 per cent say they’re Democrats, down seven points from 2008, while the proportion saying they’re Republicans has fallen to 27 per cent, according to Gallup.
The middle, which rejects both parties, is growing but the question is, what to do about it?

The nature of power is to hang on to it all costs. And that’s what Republican and Democrat parties have done. The maze of rules and cost of getting on to the ballot in 50 different states is daunting to any potential third-party candidate for president – by design. And that is why, on the very rare occasion that someone has had the fortitude to take on the entrenched powers, they’ve usually had very deep pockets, like the billionaire Ross Perot, who was the last third-party candidate.
When he ran in 1992, Americans weren’t very happy with the state of our politics. But looking back now, those days look like that once-popular TV show, Happy Days. Twenty years ago, 58 per cent of the public was satisfied with how the country was being governed. Today, that number is only 24 per cent.

So this year would seem to be the perfect time for a third-party candidacy – a not-Romney and not-Obama choice – especially if some of the obstacles could be removed.

And that’s precisely what has been attempted.

A bold and innovative group, calling themselves Americans Elect, had a big idea: make it possible for anyone with basic qualifications to run for president by overcoming the hurdle of ballot access.

They hired lawyers and signature gatherers, and set about getting themselves on to the ballot in all 50 states. And they created a secure technology platform that made it possible not only for anyone to run, but also for anyone who registered online to become a “delegate” to a virtual convention in June. There’d be a series of votes and runoffs, before a final round to establish an Americans Elect ticket, with candidates for president and vice president. And the two would have to come from differing parties or ideologies.

In effect, it was a Pop Idol of American politics.

How potentially exciting and disruptive. Hundreds of thousands of people expressed initial interest. We imagined all those who might be interested in being president if they didn’t have to go through a ridiculous primary process or spend $30 million to get on to the ballot: Colin Powell or Condi Rice, each a former secretary of state; the broadcaster Tom Brokaw; New York mayor Mike Bloomberg; Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz; former Utah governor Jon Huntsman…

But a funny thing happened on the way to the circus. The deadline for candidates to qualify came up last week, but nobody much showed up. A former congressman and Louisiana governor, Buddy Roemer, led the list of declared candidates but failed to attract the 10,000 online votes required to meet the basic threshold.

So, if everyone is so fed up with the two-party system what went wrong with this bold experiment? Some argue that it would have had a better chance in a contest without an incumbent president, as that means one side is too locked in. The technology that made it secure also made it difficult to vote. And perhaps too much personal information was demanded when people registered to join in.

So, while Americans are still unhappy with the limited choice, it appears we’re not yet ready to break up the political duopoly that’s been running the show for ever.

Yet Americans Elect has at least sown the seeds of possibility. And if America endures four more years of what we’ve been seeing lately from our two parties, and things continue getting uglier between Obama and Romney campaigns, someone may have an even better idea. It’s America after all. You’d think we could come up with something new, every couple of hundred years.

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