>Man, I never thought I'd find myself defending the U.S. electoral
>system, but at least we don't have a bunch of clerics vetting
>candidates for office. Yeah, I know there are all kinds of informal
>vetting mechanisms - money, restrictive ballot laws, ideology, media
>idiocy, etc. - but at least in theory anyone here can run for
>office. So this sort of sneer is really preposterous.
I can't take your word for that. What part of the following essay is incorrect? I should mention that the following article doesn't even mention the most odious aspect of US ballot-access laws, the fact that all these thousands of signatures required to get on the ballot means that thousands of people would have to be prepared to publicly align themselves with such a party. I can imagine it might be a risky thing to do for many working people, to publicly support for example a socialist candidate or party. It completely circumvents the principle of secret voting to require up to 5% of party supporters to go public and risk retaliation by employers.
http://www.ballot-access.org/winger/iba.html
Ballot Restrictions
Vigorous third parties existed in the last century because the election laws did not discriminate against them. People were free to form new parties, and the government treated all parties, new and old, equally. In 1854, the newly founded Republican Party won more Governor's seats, and sent more Representatives to the House, than did any other party. It was able to do so because there were no ballot-access laws until 1888. Indeed, there were no printed ballots before that year; people simply prepared their own ballots and were free to vote for the qualified candidate of their choice. When the government began to print ballots in 1888, it acknowledged this freedom of an unrestricted vote and invariably left a write-in space on the ballots.
Furthermore, in the 19th century, there was no such thing as public financing of the two major parties, which began for Presidential elections in 1974. Today, the Democrats and Republicans have their campaigns for President financed by the taxpayers. Under the 1974 law, no third party has ever received general-election public funding, although a handful of third-party Presidential candidates have received some primary season funds.
We no longer have vigorous and active third parties because Democratic and Republican state legislatures passed restrictive laws that make it exceedingly difficult for third parties to get on the ballot in many states. These laws usually require third parties to gather signatures for a petition to be on the state ballot, and they often place strict deadlines for gathering such signatures.
These restrictions did not emerge overnight. From 1888 to 1931, ballot-access laws were rather mild. In 1924, only 50,000 signatures on a petition were required to place a new party on the ballot in 48 states (a figure that represents 0.15% of the number of people who had voted in the previous election). During the 1930s, ballot-access laws became significantly restrictive, as they required new parties to gather more signatures and file for application earlier and earlier in the campaign year. Still, it was not until the 1960s that compliance with ballot-access laws became extremely difficult.
In 1994, a new party that wants to field a candidate in every race for the U.S. House of Representatives and have the party name appear on the ballot next to the candidate's name would need to register 1,593,763 members or gather an equal number of signatures. Yet the Democratic and Republican parties need not collect any signatures to assure themselves of a place on the ballot, and the number of signatures needed for individual Democratic candidates to place themselves on primary ballots in all 435 contests is 138,996 (the number would be slightly different for Republicans).
True, the severity of these ballot-access laws does vary from state to state. In Florida, one of the more restrictive states, a party is defined as one that has persuaded 5% of the state's voters to register with the new party. This may seem like an easy task, but not since the early 1900s has a third party in any state ever managed to register 5% of the voters. Even when people vote for a third party, they don't want to register with it. The Conservative Party of New York elected a U.S. Senator, James Buckley, in 1970, but they only persuaded 1.5% of the voters to register as Conservatives. Similarly, the Connecticut Party won the office of Governor in 1990, but registered only 0.1% of the voters.
Florida does offer third parties an alternative: if the new party cannot register 5% of the voters, then it can get its statewide nominees on the ballot by submitting 196,000 valid signatures on a petition (a figure that is equal to 3% of all registered voters). Once again, this task is harder than it appears. With a single exception (in California in 1948), no third party has ever met a signature requirement greater than 110,000 signatures. In fact, Florida's laws are so stringent that no third party or independent candidate for Governor has been on its ballot since 1920.
Admittedly, ballot-access laws are harsher for third-party congressional candidates than they are for third-party Presidential candidates. No third party has managed to run candidates for the U.S. House in over half of the nation's districts since 1920. By contrast, third-party Presidential candidates get on the ballots in all 50 states every so often, which probably misleads the public into thinking that there is no significant ballot-access problem for third parties.
In reality, America's ballot-access laws are so stringent, and third parties are repressed to such a degree, that the U.S. is probably in violation of the Copenhagen Meeting Document, an international agreement the U.S. signed in 1990 that requires nations to:
"Respect the right of individuals and groups to establish, in full freedom, their own political organizations and provide such political parties and organizations with the necessary legal guarantees to enable them to compete with each other on the basis of equal treatment before the law and the authorities."
How does the U.S. violate this agreement? Suppose that a new party were founded in 1994, with popular support that equaled that of the Democratic or Republican Party. In order to contest all the executive and legislative offices up for election on November 8th, 1994, it would need to collect about 4,454,579 valid signatures. And some of these signatures would need to be collected ten months before the election. By contrast, the Democratic and Republican parties would not need to submit any signatures to get themselves on the ballots, and their candidates would need only to collect about 882,484 valid signatures to place themselves on primary ballots.