A Professor Weighs In On Ballot Access

N.C.'s repressive stance on ballot access

By MICHAEL MUNGER

DURHAM -- I'm a registered Libertarian. Or I should say that I was. Now I am an outcast, a pariah. I hope I don't have to go sew a pink "L" on my shirt as an outward sign of my shame.

The State Board of Elections decided on Aug. 22 to take away my right to register or vote as a Libertarian. Now, they are being fair about it: they deny the same right to the Greens, the Socialists or any other third party.

But this was a significant decision, because we had made it onto the ballot. There were 13,000 of us actually registered as Libertarians. And more than 50,000 North Carolinians voted for Barbara Howe, the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, in 2004.

Do we "need" a third party? Do we need all that clutter, and choice, on the ballot?

Suppose you asked Ford and General Motors if the American public "needs" more choices. They'd probably say no. We don't need those Toyotas, or Lexus sedans or nice little Honda hybrids. We don't even need Dodges, Jeeps, Chryslers or other American cars. Two choices ought to be enough, our leaders with a stake in those "choices" might have us believe.

The result is that by two different measures -- access and retention -- our state has among the top-five most restrictive and undemocratic ballot access laws in the nation. We are in violation of United Nation rules on ballot access and fall well short of the requirements for "Free and Fair" elections that we publish and use to evaluate nations like Nicaragua or the Philippines. We were one of only three states where Ralph Nader was kept off the ballot in both 2000 and 2004.

Now, you can be for Nader, or against him, as a presidential candidate, but how can you argue that voters can't make their own choices? Some people accused Nader of denying Al Gore the election in 2000. But you can't blame the Green Party for trying to articulate an alternative vision of government and society, because that kind of competition of ideas is the foundation of a healthy democracy. The problem is a system of election law that forces us to make such stylized choices.

The state might argue that it doesn't exclude third parties. All a party, or a candidate, has to do is collect signatures on a petition. One hundred thousand signatures!

This means the aspiring party has to spend months of time and all of its meager cash standing on street corners and begging. Not just once. Every time there is an election. That is just too difficult a hurdle for an excluded party to jump over.

Our leaders claim they just want to keep "illegitimate" parties off the ballot. Why should the ruling two-party oligarchy decide which parties are legitimate and which are not? If we need ballot restrictions to keep certain parties away on Election Day, we must be afraid that people might actually vote for such "illegitimate" parties. To me, the fact that people might vote for them is what would prove those parties are legitimate.

The very idea of such ballot restrictions is wrong: these laws are both relatively new and completely unnecessary. Until 1981, North Carolina had much less onerous requirements, and we never had the "cluttered" ballots this law is supposed to save us from.

And other states?

The average petition requirement, across all other states, is just one-half of 1 percent; that's a quarter of our present requirement in North Carolina (2 percent of the total votes cast in the preceding gubernatorial or presidential race). No state with a requirement of at least 5,000 petition signatures has ever had even 10 choices on the ballot. Very few states have as many as four alternatives.

The problem is not with the parties that want to offer choices, or with the citizens who would like to see some challenges to the status quo.

The problem is with the overly restrictive and repressive laws that keep all of us from having a voice in the first place. The Political Repression Hall of Fame is not how we should want to be remembered as a state, or as a people.

(Michael Munger chairs Duke University's political science department. He has announced his intention to run for governor in 2008, if the Libertarians regain ballot access.