Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [126]
The system locks out a third-party candidate in many ways. If you are running for a national office like the presidency, shouldn’t the criteria be the same in every state to earn a place on the ballot? You’d think so. But no, I would have to fulfill fifty different criteria in fifty different states. In some states, it’s so ridiculous that you must use a certain size and type of paper on which to gather your petition signatures. The number of signatures required, from state to state, is never the same, either.
It was created this way by the two parties, in order to make an independent candidate jump through as many hoops as possible. Why do you think, oftentimes when Nader would achieve success in making it onto a state’s ballot, one of the parties would immediately file a challenge and tie it up in court until it was too late? Again I ask, is that the true meaning of democracy—filing suit to keep people from running for public office?
Here’s what I would do. In a federal election, the same criteria should apply in every state, across the board. To get on the ballot, you would need to get an established number of signatures by a certain date—based on either a percentage of that state’s population, or simply a specific number like, maybe, 25,000. Besides that, you’d only need to meet the other existing qualifications: born in the United States, be at least thiry-five years old, and so on.
The next rub is the presidential debates. First of all, we have to get the debates back into the hands of a neutral party. In 1992, when Ross Perot scared the pants off the two parties by getting almost 20 percent of the vote, that entitled him to nearly $30 million of our tax dollars if he chose to run again in ’96. Shouldn’t that entitlement—and the fact that he received one out of every five votes—also have automatically qualified Perot to take part in any ’96 debates?
Well, that wasn’t allowed. Up until that point, all presidential debates had been under the jurisdiction of the League of Women Voters. In 1996, Congress took them away from the League and formed another bureaucratic layer of government, the Federal Debate Commission. It so happens that the commission’s members are not elected, but appointed, by the former heads of the Republican and Democratic national parties. In fact, two of the appointees were themselves the former heads of the two parties. They now determine who you get to hear in the debates.
That year, it was Bill Clinton running for reelection against Bob Dole. Dole did not want Perot in the debates, because he felt it would erode his conservative base. Clinton did not want debates at all because he was so far ahead that debates could only bring his numbers down. So, the two of them made a backroom deal. They would eliminate Perot if Clinton was allowed to say how many debates there would be, and when. They took this to the Federal Debate Commission and, of course, it was rubber-stamped. That’s how we were denied seeing Perot take part in a spirited three-person debate. That year, the only two debates were held—by design—at the same time as the World Series.
Now whether or not someone can participate in debates is based upon an arbitrary polling figure. You have to be polling nationally at 15 percent. If that criteria had been applied in Minnesota, I would not have become the governor. Because at the time of the primary, I was only polling at 10 percent. But I was allowed to debate, and I proved that you could be at 10 percent and still end up winning. And I did it in a mere eight weeks.
We all know that polls can be skewed. It’s all in how the questions get asked, in order to get whatever numbers they desire. Instead of the way they’ve rigged it, I think whether you’re allowed to debate ought to be based on whether yours qualifies as a major party. If a candidate has achieved 5 percent of the vote at a national level, that would confer major-party status and entitle him or her to be part of the debates.
The way it works instead? Let me draw an analogy to playing football: The