Other benefits from election day: guaranteed Libertarian ballot access in 30 states plus DC

One of the difficulties intentionally engineered into our political system is a byzantine ballot access maze designed to keep third parties either away from the ballot or spending so much money on access that they cannot effectively campaign.

Everybody knows about GOP lawsuits attempting to keep Libertarians off the ballot in places like Pennsylvania and Iowa, but you may not know just how many millions the Libertarian Party spends each election cycle just for the "privilege" of losing elections.

Here's a way to quantify it: on the East Region directors' calls for the Gary Johnson campaign, we didn't find out until late September that all of our states had submitted enough signatures (often tens of thousands) to appear on their respective ballots.

You cannot campaign effectively when you are not sure you will even be on the ballot.

Now, thanks to strong showings by Libertarian candidates in Washington DC, New Mexico, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming, those state join the other 22 states in which the LP already had secured access.

For 2014 and 2016 this represents a savings of about $2 million that we can put into campaigning rather than keeping ourselves viable.

Comments

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici

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