Grand Illusion
The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
(The New Press: New York, 2009)
By Theresa Amato
A Review by Pat Choate
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As the 1996 presidential election approached, the Association of State Green Parties was looking for someone to be their candidate for President. The person they drafted was Ralph Nader; one of the most respected public figures in the United States.
Although the Greens were able to get Nader on the ballot in 22 states, he never had a chance of winning the presidency. However, presidential campaigns are about far more than winning. Being in a race for the Presidency, a candidate has an opportunity to raise issues with the American public in a serious forum. Thus, Nader used the race to highlight policy issues that Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Robert Dole, the Republican candidate ignored, such as the outsourcing of jobs and industries because of the U.S. participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement and the lack of a national health care agenda. The race provided a unique opportunity, and he made good use of it.
Bill Clinton, the sitting President, easily won the election. Nader got 684,000 votes or slightly less than one percent. Yet, something else happened in that election of great significance. The newly formed Reform Party, and its candidate Ross Perot, received slightly more than eight million votes, though Dole and Clinton blocked his participation in the Presidential debates. Under the 1974 Campaign Reform Act if a party secures five percent or more of the popular vote, they qualify as a "National Party" and thus public funding for the next Presidential election. Suddenly, the possibility of a real third party challenge to the two party duopoly on policy issues and even for public office seemed possible.
Following the 1996 election, however, the Reform Party drifted into internal squabbling, fell apart, and by the time of the primaries for the 2000 election had squandered their opportunity.
Ralph Nader and the Green Party picked up the fallen baton. In the 2000 elections, Nader again led the Green ticket, but this time he mounted a serious effort to secure the five percent of the national vote required to make the Greens a national party. Moreover, the Nader campaign was able to get their candidate on the ballot in 44 states. A five percent win meant that Nader and this new party would have a national forum for at least four more years from which they could raise the issues the two major parties refused to discuss, plus they could mount state and local campaigns. Overnight, the Greens would be a major rallying point for independents and others who wanted real policy and political change. And they would get precious public financing in the 2004 Presidential campaign.
The 2000 presidential race was intense and despite a heroic effort, the Greens were unable to reach the five percent mark. However, Nader did get more than 2.8 million votes or 2.7 percent, a strong showing for any third party. Gore, of course, lost though he won the popular vote. Leading Democrats, then as now, claimed that Nader's success was the cause of Al Gore's defeat.
Even a superficial review of that election reveals that Gore lost because of his political incompetence. He failed to win his home state, where his family had a long-standing political dynasty. He refused to allow his campaign to actively involve Bill Clinton, who though ethically challenged was nonetheless immensely popular with voters. He dithered on how to handle the Florida recount, eventually allowing the Republicans to take the matter before the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court which then stopped the recount in Florida and gave the election to George W. Bush in a 5-4 decision.
Because of Gore's failure, the most incompetent President in American history took the office, led the nation into a seemingly endless war in the Mid-East, and precipitated a collapse of the global economy that wiped out almost 40 percent of the national wealth in a span of his last 18 months in office.
Which brings us to this magnificent book by Theresa Amato, Ralph Nader's campaign manager in the 2000 and 2004 election, and the riveting story she tells.
Amato was both Nader's national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for both those elections. She is a Harvard graduate and holds a law degree from NYU School of Law. She has been a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and at the Harvard Law School. Even better for the reader, she was an insider in those campaigns and knows precisely what happened, plus she is skilled writer and storyteller. While the book covers the 2000 election, it is really about the 2004 campaign.
By late 2003, the disaster of the Bush Presidency was obvious to anyone who would look. Many Democrats viewed Bush's defeat in 2004 as a real possibility if not a certainty.
Because the Democratic leadership believed that Nader was the cause of Gore's defeat in 2000, they decided to do everything in their power to keep him off the ballot in 2004. As the book reveals, their obsession with Nader and the vast resources of money and lawyers they invested in smearing him and sabotaging his campaign is one of the reasons John Kerry lost the election in 2004.
As with the Reform Party, the Greens had internal conflicts by the time of the 2004 election. Thus, Nader ran as an independent. And as in the two prior elections, he had to mount a massive effort to get on the individual state ballots. This time, however, the full might of the Democratic establishment was put against him and his supporters, led by the Democratic National Committee. One of their smears is that Nader was simply an egotist. Another line was that the GOP was financing his campaign. Neither was true.
The challenge to get on the ballot by an independent or third party are a mish-mash that vary widely. Plus, any candidate must carefully follow all the rules imposed by the Federal Election Commission, which was created by the 1974 campaign laws. These state eligibility rules and FEC dictates, not surprisingly, favor the Democrats and Republican Parties and do so overwhelmingly.
To get on the state ballots, Amato hired professional petitioners who are skilled in securing the required signatures. The Democrats responded by enlisting paid and volunteer lawyers to disrupt the process with any legal technique, proper or not, that they could. In Oregon, a prominent law firm sent petitioners an intimidating letter warning that anyone falsely signing a petition may be convicted of a felony with a fine of up to $100,000 or prison for five years. Then, thirty of the Nader petitioners had an unannounced visit at their homes by two persons identifying themselves as "investigators" who asked information about who had hired them and where they were seeking signatures. Amato, of course, protested such intimidation to the Oregon Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections, but did nothing. Subsequently, she learned that the lawyer and "investigators" were working for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) using the same thuggish techniques that anti-union employers use against union organizers.
Despite the intimidation, the Nader campaign submitted 28,000 signatures, although he needed only 15,306 to get on the ballot. The balance was for insurance.
Although all the signatures had been validated by county elections officers, who signed and dated every sheet with an affidavit of authenticity, the Secretary of State's Office created some new "unwritten rules" to disqualify signatures. One new rule was that every signature on a sheet, which may have 50 or more names, must be legible. If even one signature was ruled illegible, the Secretary of State discarded the entire sheet and all the voter signatures. Another "unwritten" rule was that any correction of a date by a single person on the sheet, such as changing a 7 to an 8, meant that the entire sheet and all the signatures were also discarded. After all these new unwritten rules were applied, Nader had a final tally of 15,088 signatures - 258 short.
Ray Bradbury -- the Oregon Secretary of State, a Kerry supporter, and the Democratic candidate in 2004 for reelection to the position- sent out a letter after his decision bragging about how he had kept Nader off the ticket, while asking the recipients for campaign contributions to fund his own reelection. Kathleen Harris, the former Secretary of State in Florida who botched the 2000 Florida recount, looks positively competent in comparison with Bradbury and dozens of other state election officials that Amato identifies in this book.
The Nader campaign immediately appealed Bradbury's decision to the Marion County Circuit Court, which ruled in Nader's favor and ordered his name put onto the ballot. The Secretary of State appealed the decision at the Oregon Supreme Court, which ruled that Bradbury had the authority to make up "unwritten rules" and thus ordered Nader's name taken off the ballot. Amato appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. It refused to hear the case.
Over the next several months, the Nader campaign faced 24 similar actions in 17 other states. Repeatedly, they would petition the U.S. Supreme Court for what were obvious constitutional violations and always the Justices rejected their request for a hearing. Perhaps no one should be surprised that a Court that would stop a voter recount and declare the winner of a Presidential election by a 5-4 vote would ignore the pleas of a third party candidate.
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