Fighting the good fight

Rome News-Tribune ^ | 10/09/02 | editor

[Lysander]

Fighting the good fight

ONE HAS TO ADMIRE the sheer gumption and staying power of Wayne Parker, the candidate for Congress in the 11th District who is 99.9 percent sure not to be on the ballot and whom most folks probably wouldn't vote for anyway. His fight is the people's fight, whether they know it or not. Parker, who is from Carroll County, is the treasurer of the state Libertarian Party. He's been beating his head out for months collecting signatures and fighting court battles against stacked odds (stacked by Georgia's two traditional major parties) trying to give voters a chance to, probably, reject his opinions and positions. Libertarians consider that they do well when they can get 5 percent of the vote ... when they can get on a ballot. In probably any other state than Georgia (and Arkansas), Parker's name would be on your Nov. 5 ballot. Indeed, he has done far, far more than most other states require for a third-party candidate to get on the ballot. He collected about 18,000 signatures ― name, address, phone number and notarized signature, as required by Georgia law. He only needed 9,558 of them (5 percent of the votes cast in the last general election) but saw more than 8,400 of his total thrown out, supposedly because election officials couldn't verify those voters lived in the reconfigured 11th District.

THE SECRETARY of State's office did confirm that he had about 9,100 valid signatures but, shucks and tough luck, that was just a bit short. Parker has lost in court after court trying to get this rectified and now is talking about urging a "none of the above" protest vote in the contest. To understand and appreciate how ridiculous Parker's dilemma is one has to know that Georgia has special rules for getting on a U.S. House ballot. The statewide Libertarian Party, for offices like governor, only had to come up with the needed signatures once (about 136,000 of them) and then had a permanent place on the ballot. For a U.S. House bid, one has to come up with those signatures every two years. Other states don't have hurdles that high. Some hardly have hurdles at all and third-party candidates ― not only Libertarian but Socialist and Communist and Green and so forth ― can commonly be found on ballots elsewhere. There are minor-party candidates running in eight of Tennessee's nine congressional districts this year, for example. In Mississippi, to get on the ballot all a party has to do is submit a list of its officers ― no voter signatures or proof of support at all. What Georgia's two existing big parties, which obviously write the election laws in the legislature, are so scared of is hard to figure out. Especially regarding Libertarians, whose philosophies tend to attract former Republicans and Democrats fairly equally (it's an over-simplification, but Libertarians are generally conservative on economic matters and liberal on social issues).

COME TO THINK of it, though, it says something disturbing about the current level of interest in the race for Congress (and others) that Parker's tilting at windmills has been one of the few lively topics during this election season. Parker is himself a former Republican whom one suspects couldn't agree with that party's social policies. Now he does independent communications and Internet marketing work, but he used to be president of Ed First, Inc. in Rockmart, which operated mental-health facilities, and principal of the Murphy-Harpst Children's Home in Cedartown. Despite his optimist rhetoric ("The average Joe is tired of choosing their candidate like they do their toothpaste ― choosing the one that advertises the most.") one doubts Parker in his wildest dreams would expect to win. Libertarians just want a chance to get their positions heard, to be asked to the various candidate forums and debates, to perhaps get their press releases actually read by the media outlets. The public should agree with Parker on this: He and his party deserve to be heard, deserve to be on the ballot. Our system is built on the assumption that the people are fully capable of making the right choices. They can't make the right choices if they are being denied choices. The state and its major political parties need to revisit Georgia's candidacy and ballot requirements. Georgians are being denied an option, and even the sound of dissenting voices, that are allowed to be heard in 48 of the other states. There can be no clash of ideas when some of the armies of thought are being kept off the electoral battlefields.

IT SEEMS THAT Georgians don't have the same level of representative democracy that the rest of the nation has. And most of them don't even know it. In this sense, Parker and others like him are waging the good fight. On or off the ballot, they should be encouraged never to give up.

[Lysander]

Say what you want about Libertarians. Idealism is not dead in America. If only Republicans had not given in to being "Liberal lites" they would still have fighters like this in the party!

[Lysander]

Voter fraud bump. The DemocRATS inflated the 5% needed by including dead voters in the total voter count!