Barr: Balko slams the two party monopoloy

[Clark Kent]

11-03-2008 02:10 PM
Radley Balko points out the hypocrisy of ballot access laws in his Fox News column:

Those of you voting in Louisiana or Connecticut this week won’t have the option of voting for Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr for president. In both states, Barr’s campaign insists it had more than enough signatures to put his name on the ballot. But in Louisiana, the courts determined that Barr’s campaign missed the filing deadline. That was in part because state offices were closed the week of the deadline, due to Hurricane Gustav. No matter. A federal court determined it would be too expensive to reprint the state ballots to include Barr’s name.

In Connecticut, state officials initially said the Barr campaign came up about 500 names short of the 7,500 signatures required to put Barr’s name on the ballot. They later acknowledged that they had made an addition error. Barr was only 321 names shy of the minimum. The state then admitted that state officials had actually lost 119 pages of signatures—almost certainly enough to put Barr over the top. Nevertheless, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Barr would not be on the ballot, citing testimony from Connecticut officials that it would be “nearly impossible” to reprint the ballots to include him.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the tables were turned. Both the Republican and Democratic parties somehow missed that state’s deadline to include Barack Obama and John McCain on the Texas ballot. Barr’s campaign sued, noting the equal protection problems with allowing the two major parties to skirt campaign rules while holding third party candidates to the letter of the law. Barr was right — Obama and McCain should have been kept off the Texas ballot. But Barr’s suit was dismissed by the Texas Supreme Court without comment. Apparently, the Democratic and Republican parties are, to borrow a now-tired phrase, “too big to fail.” They’re allowed to break the rules.
[...]
The two major parties have effectively cemented their grip on power by creating laws that make it virtually impossible for upstarts to compete with them. They have effectively done with campaign laws what federal business regulations tend to do in the private sector — protect the behemoth, entrenched dinosaurs that dominate the industry by making it too expensive and difficult for anyone to challenge them.

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Balko recently stated over at Reason that he is voting for Bob Barr.

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