[GPSCC-chat] Merc: CA Minor Parties Facing Extinction Under New Voting System

[Drew]

http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_20764086/californias-minor-parties-facing-extinction-under-new-voting

California's minor parties facing extinction under new voting system
By Josh Richman
jrichman at bayareanewsgroup.com
Posted:   06/01/2012 06:32:21 PM PDT
Updated:   06/02/2012 10:27:22 PM PDT

They've been a colorful part of California's political landscape for decades -- Greens, Libertarians, American Independents and members of the Peace 
and Freedom Party.
But after Tuesday's election, most of them will be all but invisible -- and perhaps on their way to extinction.
In past years, minor parties held their own primary elections to choose 
nominees who would go on to compete with Democratic and Republican 
nominees in general elections. But that's no longer the case under 
California's new "top two" primary system, in which all voters choose 
from among all candidates of all parties -- and only the two candidates 
who get the most votes advance to November, regardless of party.
Because minor party candidates rarely finish in the top two, and it's now harder for their candidates 
to get on the primary ballot in the first place, the parties will have 
little or no presence on the general-election ballot. And in politics, 
invisibility means oblivion.
"It could spell the end of the 
Peace and Freedom Party," said party chairman C.T. Weber, 71, of 
Sacramento. "It's a shame that democracy is being undermined by this, 
but that's the reality if we're not able to overturn the law."
The law was set in place with Proposition 14 in June 2010, approved by 54 
percent of voters after then-state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, 
forced the Legislature's Democratic majority to put it on the ballot in 
exchange for his budget vote. Though minor parties complained from the 
get-go that they would be marginalized if not obliterated by the 
measure, voters liked the measure's stated purpose: increasing primary 
voters' choices in an effort to moderate the harsh political 
partisanship plaguing Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
Maldonado 
argued recently that minor parties will get more exposure in the new 
top-two primary and "if they represent the views of a significant number of voters in a district, they'll be in the top two. ... I don't care 
what party you're from, if you have a message that resonates with the 
people, they're going to vote for you."
But minor-party officials 
contend that giving voters only two choices in November -- with no 
write-in votes allowed -- denies parties an opportunity to spread their 
messages and hobbles their ability to field candidates in the future.
"It's not a good situation," in part because it's a lot harder to recruit 
candidates, said Kevin Takenaga, chairman of the Libertarian Party of 
California.
"The final outcome is going to be the opposite of what people expect because it's going to force people to these established 
candidates -- the ones who have more money and more major-party 
support," he predicted.
"This is the United States of America, where we have more choices in what type 
of soft drink you want to drink or restaurant you want to go to than 
political parties and candidates," added Takenaga, 39, of Sunnyvale. 
"Why do we insist on having fewer choices?"
Minor parties have 
had three ways of staying qualified for the ballot. First, they can poll 2 percent of the vote for any statewide race in a nonpresidential 
general election. With little or no presence on general-election ballots anymore, though, this will be almost impossible.
The second way is to have at least as many registered members as 1 percent of the previous total gubernatorial vote.
About 10.3 million people voted in the November 2010 gubernatorial matchup, 
so a party would need about 103,000 registered voters to qualify this 
way. The American Independent and Green parties meet this threshold now, but the Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties don't. And the less 
visible all of them become, the harder the threshold will be to reach.
The third route -- gathering petition signatures from 10 percent of the 
state's 17 million registered voters -- always has been impossible for 
the cash-strapped parties.
American Independent Party chairman 
Mark Seidenberg, 65, of Aliso Viejo, said his party's registration is 
robust enough that he's not worried about staying on the ballot, but he 
agreed it would be "a shame" for voters to be denied the choices 
afforded by other parties.
Richard Winger, who edits the Ballot 
Access News blog, is still optimistic courts will overturn Proposition 
14's obstacles to third-party access. But California already is seeing 
the effects, said Winger, 68, of San Francisco: About a quarter as many 
minor-party candidates filed for state legislative and congressional 
offices this year than in 2010.
That's because the Secretary of 
State's Office interpreted Proposition 14 to void the old system by 
which minor-party candidates could gather 150 signatures in lieu of 
paying the primary-election filing fee. Now, he said, they must gather 
the same number of signatures as a major-party candidate: 1,500 for an 
Assembly seat, 3,000 for a state Senate or House of Representatives 
seat.
Washington state's voters OK'd a top-two system in 2004, but it was declared unconstitutional by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of 
Appeals in 2005 before being reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 
2008.
Unlike in California, Washington voters don't declare party 
affiliation when they register, so maintaining party strength that way 
isn't an issue. But Jody Grage, chairwoman of that state's Green Party, 
said it has been a tough row to hoe nonetheless.
"Because the 
primary gets a lot less publicity and fewer voters, that makes a big 
difference in our visibility," she said, adding that no third-party 
candidate has advanced to a November election if two major-party 
candidates already were on the primary ballot.
Election-reform 
advocate Steven Hill, co-founder of the nonprofit FairVote, said losing 
minor parties would result in an ever-narrowing political discourse.
"Minor parties tend to be the laboratories for new ideas. They bring issues 
and ideas into the political discussion that the major parties often 
ignore," he said. "That's the first thing you're going to lose, and it's a fairly big loss."
He said most Democrat-vs.-Republican races 
end up with candidates battling for a relatively small population in the middle. So with no minor parties to widen the debate, he said, "they're going to be talking only to that narrow group of swing voters."
Laura Wells, a 64-year-old Oakland resident who was the California Green 
Party's 2010 gubernatorial nominee, hopes the new primary system leads 
to a backlash that wrecks the two-party system once and for all.
"I think we're due," Wells said. "Goodness, how bad does it have to get?"
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