This is my last pitch – why a vote for the Libertarian candidates, Governors Gary Johnson & Bill Weld, is the most meaningful ballot you can possibly cast today. It is because they are on the cusp of the historic accomplishment of getting more than 5% of the popular vote. And when they do, the Libertarian Party achieves “major party” status – and the two-party duopoly stranglehold on American government is broken, probably forever.
If the Libertarian candidate gets 5% of the vote this year, then next election the Libertarian candidate is automatically on the ballot in all 50 states – rather than having to spend a fortune in money, person-hours, and attention, collecting signatures and fighting for ballot access in each of the 50 states, all of which have differently byzantine rules about this. They also automatically get $10 million in federal election funding. (You did know the system is rigged in favor of the Rs and Ds, didn't you?)
It was the colossally broken and hyper-partisan two-party system which this year has brought us the choice of two candidates hated by a majority of Americans. It also brought us the most sordid, scurrilous, mean, issue-free, and generally unpleasant campaign in memory. If you want to avoid a repeat of this, or even worse, every four years forever, there's something you can do about it today. Vote against both of the bad options served up to you as faits accomplis, get Johnson & Weld over the 5% mark – and contribute to real change, and more choice and openness, in the American presidential selection process. Vote against this train wreck of a presidential election, and in favor of a better one next time. It's not going to get better on it's own.
But your vote today can make a real difference.
The rest of that quotation is even scarier and more prescient: “But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
