The Libertarian Party of Michigan has hit a small bump on the road to freedom. On November 27 the Secretary of State’s office certified the results of the most recent election — and decertified the LP as a legally recognized, ballot-qualified, political party.
While George Bush and Al Gore chase each other around the courts nitpicking the jots and tittles of Florida election law, while hand-wringing media pundits blather on that the very fate of the republic is hanging by a chad because a few hundred Floridians can’t seem to punch out a butterfly ballot, Michigan has at least partially disenfranchised over 130,000 people here who cast votes for one or more of the 115 Libertarian Party candidates.
The Libertarian option has now been eliminated entirely in Michigan because our ballot access law puts all of a political party’s eggs in one “top-of-ticket” basket. In order to remain legally qualified to nominate candidates for public office a party’s “principal candidate” — defined as the one whose name is highest up on the ballot — must garner votes equal to at least one percent of the votes cast for the winning candidate for secretary of state in the preceding election.
I have no idea how this particular standard came about. I suspect the process was of the type to which Otto von Bismarck was referring when he observed that those who like sausage and laws ought not watch either being made.
In any case the rule means that LP presidential candidate, Harry Browne, needed to get at least 20,555 votes or the party’s over. He didn’t. And it is. The fact that more than 1.5 million votes were cast for other Libertarian candidates in Michigan is irrelevant.
Because of the pervasive misapprehension that ours is “a two-party system” (constitutionally insupportable, but certainly a convenient mythology for the Democrats and Republicans to promote) voters are continually whipsawed with the admonition that backing anyone other than one of the major party candidates is “wasting your vote.”
This in turn can make what is an otherwise vibrant, political party with a substantial base of support vulnerable to being sentenced to death by legal rejection when voters opt to split their ticket in an effort to mitigate the damage of having one or the other of the old party candidates elected president.
This defensive voting has given rise to the all too common lament: “I didn’t like either of them, but I had to vote for the lesser of two evils.”
The problem, though probably inherent in a winner-take-all, plurality system, is greatly exacerbated by the closeness of the race between the old-party candidates. And the historic closeness of the most recent, presidential contest significantly depressed the vote for all the alternatives.
Ralph Nader got 2% in Michigan — sufficient to keep his Green Party on the ballot, but less than half what he was polling mere days before the election.
The Michigan Reform Party, as it turned out, was actually thrown a life preserver when Secretary of State (and Bush’s Michigan campaign co-chair) Candice Miller denied Pat Buchanan a place on the ballot here. This dropped Reform’s “Top-of-Ticket” race down to U.S. Senate where their candidate, though finishing fifth, still drew enough votes to meet the 20,555 minimum. Buchanan, despite a $12 million subsidy from taxpayers, didn’t fare much better than Browne nationally, and would surely have lost the Reformers their place on the Michigan ballot.
Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin and U.S. Taxpayers Party nominee Howard Phillips both finished well out of the running for retaining their respective parties place on the 2002 ballot.
Still, in spite of the setback in the presidential race, the Libertarian Party of Michigan is buoyed by its overall success, having fielded more than twice as many candidates as all the other “minor” parties combined. And most of these candidates trailed only their “major” party rivals, including Diane Barnes, the Libertarian candidate for State Board of Ed (the race that political analysts consider the true measure of any party’s base of support) who garnered more than 127,000 votes.
In fact only one of the party’s nine, statewide candidates did not meet the minimum vote threshold to maintain its ballot status — presidential nominee, Harry Browne. Unfortunately, under Michigan election law his was the only race that counted.
Libertarians are a determined bunch who have built a political party to advance a principle rather than merely to serve as a bandwagon upon which some celebrity may perch a soapbox. The petition drive to get the LP back on the ballot in time for the 2002 election will begin sometime next spring.
Maybe by the time that election actually takes place the Michigan legislature will have eliminated this misrepresentative “principal candidate” standard, so that any statewide race can satisfy the vote requirement to maintain a party’s ballot status. Anyone seeking evidence of the dangers of placing all our faith in top-of-ticket politicians need look no further than Florida.
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More on elections:
- Term Limits — A baby step in the right direction
- Democracy and Democrats
- It’s good to be King (or Clerk)
- Term Limits Redux
- Democracy in Detroit
- Wasting your vote
- The limits of Term Limits
- Reforming campaign finance reform
- School millage fatigue
- King Edward of Wayne
- “None of the Above” for Governor
- Public Act 399 and the Michigan Legislation Factory
