Democrat-led state gov’ts cut ballot rights of SWP, others
https://themilitant.com/2021/06/19/democrat-led-state-govts-cut-ballot-rights-of-swp-others/
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
Vol. 85/No. 25
June 28, 2021
Democratic Party politicians and their boosters in the liberal media
have been posturing as the foremost defenders of the voting rights of
working people, but the fact is their only interest is trying to
jerry-rig the system to assure they retain power everywhere possible.
One of their key goals is to close down ballot access for the Socialist
Workers Party and others who aren’t candidates of the bosses’ two major
parties.
Millions of workers and farmers, facing worsening working and living
conditions, are looking for a new road forward and are increasingly open
to alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans. This has made the
Democrats — and the Republicans, when it serves their partisan interests
— more determined to put roadblocks in the way of working people taking
steps toward independent political action. Socialist Workers Party
candidates call for working people to build their own party, a labor
party, to fight to take political power into our own hands.
Democratic Party-run state legislatures, backed by cooperative court
justices, have been imposing increasingly onerous ballot requirements on
“third parties.” These include upping filing fees, raising the number of
signatures that must be gathered on petitions, and pushing filing
deadlines further and further away from the elections — sometimes into
the year before!
New York a key offender
In New York state, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year helped push
through some of the most restrictive ballot-access laws nationwide.
Among other things, he tripled the number of signatures required for
statewide independent candidates to 45,000, while lowering the
requirements for the two main bosses’ parties. These changes were upheld
May 13 by U.S. District Court Judge John Koetl.
“New York now has the third highest number of signatures for a
presidential candidate running outside the two major parties,” wrote
Richard Winger in his Ballot Access News. “New York has the only
prohibition on out-of-state circulators in the nation, for minor party
petitioning. New York has the shortest petitioning period for general
election presidential procedures” and “the third earliest deadline.”
The law also raised from 50,000 to 130,000 the number of votes a third
party had to get to retain party ballot status in the next election. As
a result, the Libertarian, Green, Independence and Serve America
Movement parties lost their ballot access following the election last
November. They’ll now have to petition and meet the new, more onerous,
requirements to get a candidate on the ballot.
In Delaware, the long-time home of President Joseph Biden, the
legislature made it more difficult for a new party to qualify for the
ballot, moving the deadline from August to April 1. The new bill
requires these parties to chose their nominees a month before the
Democrats and Republicans have to announce theirs.
In Nevada, the legislature passed a bill May 31 pushing back to the end
of April the deadline for new parties to file. The law also requires
petitioners to get more signatures from all four U.S. House districts in
the state. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Roberta Lange, said these changes
were needed to give election officials more time to check the petitions.
(And search for excuses to turn them down!)
In Texas, Republican Gov. Gregory Abbott signed legislation May 26 that
would force candidates of “minor” parties to pay new “filing fees.”
These fees, which candidates running in primary elections had to pay for
over 100 years, were struck down in 1972 by the U.S. Supreme Court,
which said they amounted to a poll tax, a legacy of Jim Crow segregation.
The new Texas law also requires that candidates running for nomination
in third-party conventions must pay a fee to the state before the
convention even meets. The Democratic and Republican parties, needless
to say, are exempt from this requirement.
“No state ever imposed a filing fee on someone merely seeking to be
nominated at a convention” before, wrote Winger.
In a number of races this year, like in California where SWP candidates
did manage to get on the ballot, they discovered that state authorities
refused to list their party next to their names, instead putting “no
party” down.
All these restrictions are aimed at making it as difficult as possible
for the working class to chart its own course in politics. This, above
all, is what the monied rulers fear — workers taking steps to fight for
their own class interests and for all those who are oppressed and
exploited by capital.
But working people will take this course, and, along the road, break
down all the barriers placed in our path by the tiny minority of
capitalist families who run the U.S. today.
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Democrat-led state gov’ts cut ballot rights of SWP, others
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New Zealand rally protests military regime in Myanmar
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--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept