Denver Post

How not to waste your vote
By Ed Quillen
Special to the Denver Post

Sunday, October 20, 2002 - Finally, the mainstream media are starting to pay a little attention to minor-party candidates. Not that they get invited to televised debates, but they do appear in published candidate profiles and election guides, polls mention them and these pages have been graced with expositions by the candidates.

These aspirants are also known as "third-party candidates," but "minor-party" is a more accurate term. For one thing, "third party" suggests we have two other parties, and often it appears we actually have two branches of the Plutocratic Party. For another, "third-party" is bad arithmetic, since there are many minor parties: Libertarian, Green, Reform, Constitutional Law, Prohibition, etc.

There are a few office-holders in Colorado who belong to minor parties, but only two come to mind who were elected in partisan races, and they're both in San Miguel County, where Sheriff Bill Masters is a Libertarian and one county commissioner, Art Goodtimes, is a Green.

Both initially took office as major-party candidates, though - Masters as a Republican and Goodtimes as a Democrat - then changed affiliations before re-election.

Masters, as you might expect, is a strong critic of the War on Drugs. When he spoke at the state Libertarian convention in Leadville last May, he pointed out that the Drug War is a gross invasion of our privacy and other civil rights. He also explained that, from a law-enforcement perspective, it diverts resources from real threats to our peace and safety just to lock up people who aren't hurting anybody except, perhaps, themselves.

Greens have a reputation for being in favor of more governmental regulation, so I was somewhat surprised at the reply from Art Goodtimes a couple of years ago when he was running for re-election. I asked what his major accomplishment in his first term was, and he said it was eliminating most building and zoning codes in the west part of the county, his district.

"Around Telluride, we need them," he said. "But it's basically big farms and ranches out on my end, and we don't need the rules. So why have them?"

Travel to HungarySensible attitudes like those of Goodtimes and Masters could get more minor-party candidates elected, which would be a blessing in itself. But minor parties are important for another reason - they do the thinking for the major parties.

Our system of geographic representation, as opposed to proportional representation or a parliamentary system, pretty well insures that the United States will have two dominant political parties.

The Republicans and Democrats do not have ideological committees to determine party doctrine. Both are about assembling enough voting blocs to win an election, ideology be damned. Free-trade Republicans will support steel tariffs if it means winning in industrial states, and tree-hugging Dems will support more logging if it means protecting a Senate seat.

The two major parties are basically about winning elections, not promoting an ideology or set of principles. That's the job of the minor parties, which are about ideas and putting things on the public table that the major parties have ignored.

We can go back to 1854, when the two major parties, Whigs and Democrats, avoided the slavery question, even though that was about all Americans wanted to argue about then. They were afraid the topic would divide the parties into Northern and Southern branches, and divided parties don't do well in national elections. So a minor party, the Republicans, emerged to address slavery with forthright opposition to expanding the "peculiar institution" into the western territories.

The Populists of the 1890s won quite a few races in the West (Colorado, for instance, had a Populist governor with a working majority in the legislature for two years), but they didn't fare well nationally. At the polls, that is. Their platform - graduated income tax, regulation of railroads and utilities, farm-price supports, direct election of senators, managed currency - became law as both major parties adopted and promoted pieces of it.

George Wallace in 1968 gave voice to a blue-collar America that didn't want social progress to come at the price of economic progress, and Ross Perot in 1992 made the federal deficit an issue that the major parties had to address.

luxury hotels in GoteborgWhenever I announce my intention to vote for a minor-party candidate, I am invariably told that "you're throwing away your vote." But if there are things you care about, then a vote for a third-party candidate is hardly wasted. It's actually the best way to get the attention of the major parties.

Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.