.. but there s not that much difference between the democrats and some republicans, y vote? that s the point. and i think a lot of issues that should have been debated now, ralph is a very good at this. you may not agree with his positions with the idea is he wants to put this on the table and get it out there and people want to talk about this. he wants to talk about labor issues and trade issues and things like that and you don t really get this very much everything is clustered in the center and the idea is to spread the ideas about triet and hans has been talking about the fact that while if you have multiple parties government may not be as easy governing may not be as easy and it may be different. that may be a very good thing frankly. i mean, you look at our government. how effective are these people any way? talk about the sec and the dirty mittal situation. you talk about hey, we ve got the federal emergency management thing and katrina and there s always this
i d start with the constitution because i believe we should start looking at things like the electoral college, and i know those might be fighting words here but i am happy to engage. and think about how we launch and improve our system. our system was great made for the 18th century, but we are now in the 21st century and there have been kinds of systems devised that can be applied that can do things that can make the electoral system more reflective of the will of the people. at the end of the day, if you want consents to come from the governed, we have to look at how we vote and the system in place that offered choices for who we can vote for in order to be able to maximize consent of the governed. . . the top two vote getters are the primary, the only names to appear on the november of ballot. the primary is the biggest threat to the existence of third party is in our 50 years. my question is, in almost 200 races, almost only two candidates. they ran unopposed race. w
it is very true, senator mccain is the poster child for this law but he is almost alone on his side of the political aisle in supporting this law. when the vote came down in 2002, the majority of democrats voted for this lot and the house and senate only a small minority of republicans voted for it. the majority of republicans voted against this law because they didn t like it and almost all of the major lawsuits that have been brought to try to get this law overturned, republicans have filed including two pending lawsuits right now, which are going up against the restrictions on the parties, which is frankly they win the case will help the independent parties also because these laws are for example about the restrictions placed on the parties for engaging in activity in state elections like the election s going on in virginia and new features the. two other points. just briefly. i think we are running out of time here. first of all the idea that having multiple parties inste
then and so forth. now, the second and in my view the most important impediment to third parties is the so-called government reform, you know, when libertarians hear that government is being reformed by politicians, we always grab our wallets. and the idea of the australian ballot is that the government will prevent will print and provide the ballots. prior to the 1890s, ballots were privately printed by the parties themselves. so that any party could print up a ballot with any slate of candidates that they wanted. but in the 1890s in response to a lot of corruption that occurred in the 1888 elections, governments began to supply a single consolidated ballot for all candidates for all offices. this was the australian ballot. and by 1910, only two states did not use the australian ballot. by the way, one of those in south carolina permitted the use of private ballots up until 1950. . .. some states require tens of thousands of valid signatures on petitions just to appear o
thank you. thank you. at attorney theresa the motto and economics professor james bennett argued the two party system is an artificial creation designed to exclude any party other than democratic or republican from winning. the cato institute in washington d.c. hosts the 90-minute event. .. weird buzzing sound on the television. thank you very much. the cato institute as many of you know, stance for individuals liberty and limited government. competition offers a means to the end and competition in the markets express liberty and creates choices coming electoral competition authors alternatives indeed as james madison understood. classical liberals will be skeptical of government efforts to suppress electoral competition by fostering were protecting in the party or the two major parties in the united states today. we should also say that third parties in other countries are associated with systems of proportional representation and in those systems, we can see for exa