Dear Third Party Prez Candidates

[bolson]

Debates don't matter*, ballots do.
I heard Bob Barr talk about it yesterday, and Ralph Nader drone on about it at great length on several occasions. They want to be in the presidential debates with the nominees from The Two Parties. Whoop de doo. They won't win, they'll just contribute chaos to the system.
Without rankings ballots (* with them, debates matter again, probably more so) an educated voter knows that either they mustn't throw their vote away or that it doesn't matter because they're not in a swing state. Those are the best possible outcomes: don't vote for them or vote for them where it doesn't matter.
I like third parties. I like their positions. I want the more interesting debate that could be had. I reiterate my asserion that their platform should be:
1. Election reform. (rankings ballots, ballot access laws, etc.)
2. The rest of their platform.

Comments

[cos]

Depends on whether their goal is to govern, or to affect the issues focus of a campaign, and through that, affect how the winner (who is not them) will govern. There's a lot a candidate can do through being in the debates, if their goal is the latter.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Speaking of election reform, I've recently come to the conclusion that I strongly support the right to vote for convicted felons (apparently some of these restrictions are being loosened across the US, and vary from state to state. Personally I think felons should be allowed to vote even while in prison -- as is current policy in Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Zimbabwe)

One risk of denying felons the right to vote is that a party holding a slim majority can make an action commonly committed by supporters of the other party a "felony", step up law enforcement, and statistically affect voter outcomes in the next election. While the accusation has been made that some drug laws fit into this category, a more compelling example is the case of southern states after the extension of the right to vote to blacks. It is also worth noting that while the two examples I cite are cases where these laws have hurt liberal politics, it is also possible for them to cut the other way. One merely has to find an activity which is statistically correlated with conservative voting patterns and could plausibly be made illegal.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#Current_Application

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

see also :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.gif

[truthspeaker.livejournal.com]

Many 3rd parties have a single issue or one issue that is more important than the rest. Much of their purpose is to bring that issue to public attention, so they are serving their purpose quite nicely.

A 3rd party is most successful when one of the two main parties incorporates the 3rd party platform into their own. That tends to reinforce that single-issue parties are the most "successful" though not the longest-lived. (Note that the measure of "success" is debatable here.)

[soong.livejournal.com]

I keep wanting to measure success by winning elections. I guess there are other ways to measure success, but I wish those ways didn't collide with the electoral system which has some very important work to do and shouldn't be distracted by too much noise.

[truthspeaker.livejournal.com]

You definitely have a point, which is why I consider my measure of success to be debatable.

However, I do think their presence, disruptive though they may be, does cause old established parties to adopt new platforms. On the other hand, the idea that this is a necessary evil for our political system is an argument in favor of governments with a parliamentary system, though that has other problems instead.