Dump the Duopoly: a Diatribe Against the Two-Party System

A Little Background First
The first election I participated in was after I turned 18 in 1988. I was a student at San Francisco State University, and I volunteered for the Dukakis campaign. In time, I was the Area Coordinator for the SFSU campus and surrounding neighborhoods. After knocking on doors for 3 months to gauge voter preference, I ran the get-out-the-vote operation on election day. It was a challenging and exhilarating experience to be so engaged in the political process.

Of course, the election did not turn out as I had wished, and I felt robbed, as the popular vote in California was 50% for Bush and 49% for Dukakis. Why did almost half the population of the largest state not have any effect on the final outcome?

I was also disheartened by the campaigning itself: the cynical labeling by the Baker-Bush assault, the measured and feeble responses by Dukasis. The whole exercise felt driven by shallow symbolism, appeals to fear, and a reckless abuse of facts. To me, the two parties were actually distracting the populace from a discussion of the issues that faced our nation.

The Response: A Steady Diet of Third Parties
After the 1988 experience, I forswear allegiance to either party, knowing full well that my vote was "wasted" by supporting third parties. With a few exceptions, I have never voted for either the Demorepublicans since then. The only exceptions I can recall was when I voted for the Republican candidates to the Washington DC city council when I lived in DC in the early 1990s: the local Democratic machine was so obviously corrupt and stagnated, I felt it my duty as a resident to somehow shake up the situation. The other exception is that I voted for Obama in 2008, and I only did b/c he was black; whatever misgivings I had about his lame, outdated campaign platform, I felt it was more important to elect a nonwhite president to further heal America's tortured racial ecology.

Otherwise, depending on the office and where I was at the time of the election, I've voted for either the Greens, the Libertarians, the American Independence Party, the Reform Party, the New Alliance Party, and others. As you can see, my choices ran across the ideological spectrum, and my only interest was to rob the major parties of my support.

Diagnosis of the Duopoly
Before the Civil War, political competition in this country was actually rather healthy. Though there were in general only 2 major parties, there also existed a good number of smaller parties that influenced the major parties to change public policy for the better. The beginning of the end began when state legislatures passed laws to make balloting secret (aka "Australian ballot"). As argued by Heckelman, the secret ballot did stop open bribery (where political parties used color coded ballots to bribe votes), but the secret ballot also gave incumbent parties an advantage. As the government was now responsible for printing and distributing the secret ballots, another consequence of this reform is that it put ballot access in the hands of the government, and whomever controlled the government could control ballot access.

And that is exactly what the 2 parties did with their hold on power: used the state to restrict ballot access through multiple means, some blatant, others nefarious. The most obvious impediment to alternative parties is that at most levels of government in the US, elections are decided on the what is called the "winner-take-all" or "first-past-the-post" systems, wherein the candidate with a simple plurality wins that office, or in the case of presidential elections, all the electoral votes for that state.

Beyond that are a myriad of laws designed to restrict ballot access:

• High signature requirements
  
• Discriminating filing fees
• Vote share requirements from prior elections
• Identification requirements to vote

And then there's the money thing: the cost of advertising makes it extremely difficult for third parties to gain enough exposure, and even if the party does have the financial means (such as Ross Perot's Reform Party in the 1992 presidential election), voters will still see their vote as wasted because of the first-past-the-post standard, and any viable third party candidate is invariably perceived as a "spoiler vote" as was the case in the 2000 presidential election.

Solution: Any suggestions?