While the United States of America was not the first declared democracy on this planet, it has long thought itself the most effective democracy, indeed the most effective government of all the forms thus far tried by man. While this opinion may not be as boisterously held by others as it is by us citizens of these United States, most nations acknowledge that the U.S. also has the role of role model for fledgling democracies. Those peoples who seek democracy generally start with an effort to imitate the American model.

While the American experiment in democracy began over two hundred years ago, most observers acknowledge that our system of American governance is a work in process, and continuously evolving.

Many would say that the present trends are away from the basic principles of democracy, enunciated so eloquently, and so simply, by President Lincoln, as government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The roots of these trends may be found in the greed imbedded in the human spirit, the pressure of a hectic life style which forces many us to ignore both government and our civic duties thereto, or maybe simply the overwhelming feeling that one voice counts for so little these days.

Unfortunately, the apathy running rampant in our citizenry has become yet another tool in the arsenal of those bent on wresting control of the government from the people. This proposal highlights one such effort, and earnestly seeks the Carter Center’s intervention into the process, in order to restore democratic principles to all phases of this Presidential Election.

An initial problem in this election year, simply stated, is that the two major parties’ candidates for President of the United States have not been selected by a sufficient number of citizens to give them any cachet of authenticity, sufficient to exercise leadership of this very powerful country. What’s worse is that the backers of these two principal candidates, recognizing the failings of these, their private choices, have sought, and found, cracks in the legal processes described for campaigning and electing officers, which allow their presidential candidates to skate through the campaign without significant challenge, and without fully informing the American People of the candidates and their thoughts on issues of importance and their plans for promoting the common good.

The major problem is that the two predominant political parties in the United States, through their agent, the Commission on Presidential Debates, have conspired to deny other meaningful candidates a public forum from which to challenge the two major political candidates.

The result is that, a significant public resource, the broadcast spectrum, which has been licensed to private organizations, is now scheduled to be used by these two political parties, and these two political parties alone, to espouse their positions, denying the same right to the other candidates. The voters will be denied their right to full access of information about the candidates running for President.

The structure of this request begins with an Introduction, followed by brief discussions on the three phases of the Presidential Campaign,

•  Selection of Candidates

•  Campaigning (with a section on the Commission on Presidential Debates)

•  Voting

Since the action complained of is set to occur next week during the Campaigning phase, that is the principal part of the discussion that follows. A brief Conclusion section is also offered for consideration.

The purpose of this request is to seek an informed, impartial overview of the ongoing 2000 U.S. Presidential Election Campaign. It is in the vital interests of the citizens of the U.S., the continued existence of the Carter Center, and possibly the future well being of the citizens of the Earth, that such an observation and review be performed. It is imperative that such observation begin at once, because two particular groups of politicians have chosen to deny the citizenry of this country its right to select among all Constitutionally-qualified candidates, and, if allowed to go unchallenged, this single act will destroy the effectiveness of this year’s Presidential Election.

Democracy means many things, and will be discussed here, both as a philosophy, a set of liberating beliefs, and as a process, a means to maximize individual liberty. Both facets of democracy are in peril today, in the United States.

Democracy, as a set of beliefs is a series of contrasts: the most powerful governing philosophy yet devised, and also the most fragile; the most penetrating of all practices into society, and also the most easily avoided; the most difficult to establish and the easiest to lose.

We, in the United States of America, are in immediate danger of losing our democracy.

There are many root causes for this: our society's general well-being, the frenetic pace of modern life, the historically low regard for government, exacerbated by the increasingly-low regard for the country's political leaders.

The situation today is dangerous, because in our country we have not only those enabling general sentiments, but we also have a significant group of citizens who exercise the inherent competitive spirit in each of us with complete abandon. This elite group has, as its only goal, its maximum aggrandizement, apparently seeing wresting control of the government from the people, as an attainable tool in accomplishing this. The incredible flooding of money into the campaigns of the two major party candidates is clear evidence that the contributors, at least, think this is possible.

And modern technology has given this group the power to, if not control, at least stupify, our minds. A free press is meaningless, if its goal is profitability. When journalism became competitive, and was allowed to merge into megacorporations with no motivation other than profit, our country lost a significant brake on the out of control race toward an elite takeover of our government, our industry, and our lives.

The process of democracy is best described with an example, and here, for obvious reasons, the example will be the 2000 U.S. Presidential Campaign and Election. It may be considered as having three separate phases: the selection of candidates, the campaign, and the election. While the Carter Center has focused in many of the processes of the 16 countries it has observed, it is clear that each of these three processes is an important link in the chain toward effective democratic government.

Our Constitution requires that a candidate for President must be a native-born citizen, and at least 35 years old. Of the 150,000,000 or so potential candidates this clause creates, practice and practicality serve to significantly reduce the number of candidates.

As part of the intent to avoid the national concentration of all power, the laws governing becoming candidates for office have been left to the individual states, within the very broad guideline above for presidential candidates.

Most states acknowledge the existence of political parties, and, in a widely varying set of standards, allow organizations which have been designated parties in an individual state, to place a candidate selected by them on the presidential ballot with little to no further effort. Groups of citizens who are not designated political parties can present candidates for the ballot, but the requirements for so doing vary from paying a nominal fee in some states, to attempting to jump through a series of unjustifiably-complex hoops including obtaining large numbers of signatures, which are validated or discarded in private without supervision by state bureaucracies.

The difficulties in becoming a non-major party, national candidate for President in recent years have resulted in only one candidate succeeding in achieving such status, and he was an enormously wealthy American, who spent significant amounts of his personal wealth to get on the ballots across the country.

The two major parties have, in similar fashion, become nothing more than preliminary contests in which, recent history shows, the candidate with the most money available wins. What was intended to be a vehicle for selecting two candidates, one to represent each of two widely held, but contrasting, philosophies of politics and government, has become nothing more than a marketing campaign to solicit and spend vast sums of money. The monies received are then used to highlight superficial differences between candidates, avoiding at all costs any candidate becoming bound to the political philosophy hammered out in his party's platform.

There is strong, widespread feeling that the candidate selection process has not brought forward the best possible candidates; there is even the feeling, perhaps less widespread, that the process did not allow the selection of the best possible candidate from among those candidates, within their party, who announced for the office.

But, in the instant election, this process is complete, and the American People must now choose from among the candidates legally before them.

The major parties' two candidates are each addressing the same issues in a grossly similar, but factually barren fashion, while avoiding other equally (some would say strikingly) relevant issues. Without the benefit of the hundreds of millions of dollars, there are 28 other Democratic candidates and 27 Republican candidates, and an additional 3-5 candidates, nominated by parties with a national presence, running based on principles starkly different from the centrist posture(s) of the two major parties. Rounding out the field, there are more than a hundred other candidates, setting the grand total of one interested tallying organization at 157; platforms for these other candidates range from legalizing marijuana (The Grassroots Party) to whatever may happen when the Barking Spider Resurgence Party's namesake resurges.

International standards for democratic elections are based on the proposition set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 21) and in all other major human rights documents that the authority to govern derives from the will of the people of a country, and their will must be demonstrated through genuinely democratic election processes. This requires:

The development of mass media, and the concentration of its ownership have created a new, and discomforting situation within the perspective of the campaign. Today's national media speaks more and more from the same sources of information, and with direction from less than half a dozen corporate masters.

Whether the cause is inattention, lack of skill, or the economic pressures of competition, it is far easier to fill the airwaves with an hour long coverage of a car chase than it is to cover a candidate's campaign activities. Recognizing however that such coverage is expected, some media have seen fit to provide coverage for the two major party candidates to the exclusion of all the other candidates. This exclusion has been made unilaterally, and serves to deny the other candidates, and their supporters their constitutional right to be bona fide candidates - if we are to believe that the Constitution intended that a natural born citizen over 35 had the right to be a bona fide candidate.

What else could it mean?

The commercialization of the media is a disquieting trend in our society, but probably one beyond the purview of the Carter Center.

What has serendipitously presented itself as a technological addition to participatory democracy is the electronic version of what many citizens hold as the model of democracy, the debate between competing ideas. Begun in 1960, and continued intermittently since then, the Presidential debates have become a principal source of information for the electorate.

In 1996, less than 50% of the eligible voters chose to vote. The reasons for such performance are many, but these reasons can generally be grouped into two root categories, disgust, and apathy. No matter which side of the Washington controversies an individual may take, all will agree that the past four years have done little to improve respect for the statesmanship and leadership abilities of our elected politicians.

So, we are now in the middle of the campaign, with an electorate who showed their disinterest in presidential politics four years ago by not voting in record numbers, subjected to a barrage of campaign ads from two candidates, each seeking to be more centrist, and less explicit, than the other. In previous polls, this electorate has said that 70% of them relied on the national televised debates to learn about the candidates, and determine for whom to vote.

In this post trauma election year filled with more political money than ever before, it seems likely that the presidential debates will serve an even more significant role in helping electors decide whether or not to vote, and, if so, for whom.

For that reason the debates must present the most broadly-based, neutral presentation of competing ideas possible. These debates must provide the general electorate with the most effective presentation possible of all competing political philosophies. Some might call that democracy in action.

It appears now that the nationally-televised debate participants have been selected exclusively by representatives of the two major parties. Guess how many candidates they selected, and which ones?

The Commission attempts to justify its arbitrary decisions for exclusion of bona fide candidates for President, based on three criteria:

•First, the Constitutional qualifications for President (repeated infra below)

•Second, a mathematical possibility to achieve a majority of electoral votes, based on the number of states in which that candidate appears. This is clearly unconstitutional, since the Constitution provides for selection of any candidate receiving even one vote from the Electoral College to become the President.

•Third, that each candidate for President must achieve 15% voter support to be considered. No basis is offered for the selection of 15%, vice 14%, or 16%, or 2%, or 5%. History shows us that the first time 15% appeared as a criterion was to exclude John Anderson from the second Presidential debate in 1980, when he had appeared to have strengthened his position in the first debate. It apparently was resuscitated in 1996 to exclude Ross Perot, when Perot’s presence in the 1992 Presidential debates had been ‘uncomfortable’ to the major parties. The 15%, as an effective clip level for third party candidates, has received some validation - at least, if you view it from the point of view of the major parties trying to protect what they view as their exclusive franchise. As recently as 1998, an independent, Jesse Ventura, although polling only 10% at the time, was allowed to participate in the Minnesota Gubernatorial Debates. He convinced the voters through the debate, and subsequent activities, that he was the best candidate and he subsequently won the election, clearly a result inimical to the interests of the two major parties.

Clearly this was sufficient justification for the Republican and Democratic Parties to attempt to deny the public airwaves to all competition. What is not clear is why so many prominent citizens, who know how self-serving this decision is, have kept silent for so long.

The Constitution clearly states the qualifications for a candidate for President:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States. Art II, Section 1 Paragraph 5, U. S. Constitution

 

The only other part of the Constitution that could conceivably be used to restrict the number of candidates for President is that portion of the electoral vote counting instructions, which says that, when the lists of names the individual state electors voted for to be the President are tallied,

If this were given the strictest Constitutionally-permissible interpretation, it would have to say that at least 5 candidates of the 150+ have the ‘mathematical’ ability to become President, and should therefore be included in the debate.

The general disgust that the majority of the American people feel for things political can only grow, if this gross usurpation of power by the two major parties is allowed to stand.

According to your report on the Chinese village election project, even in a country as politically repressive as Communist China, the predominant party allowed other candidates, non-party members to stand before the village and speak to their platforms.

The history of the presidential debates has not been distinguished by a great deal of even-handed effort at getting the electorate informed. At this critical juncture, it is vital that we Americans not allow this travesty created by the Republican and Democratic Parties to continue. Exit polls in both 1988 and 1992 showed that more voters based their balloting decisions on the debates than on any other single factor. More than 97 million people watched the third and final presidential debate in 1992. These debates are too important to the campaign process to be taken over by the Republican and Democratic National Parties.

If it is our right to run for President, it is our right to be heard - even over the cacophony of unprecedented money in this campaign.

There's not much point in having an election, if the free exchange of ideas is stifled so completely by the two party structure, that the only voters participating are the party members who see some personal benefit from the election of their party leaders.

From the time of candidate selection, the two party influence has eaten away at our liberties. Although the U. S. Supreme Court has said that ballot access legislation formulated by the two major parties without significant influence from minority parties is suspect, the inertia of state legislatures and state legislation has served to all but destroy free ballot access in the current election.

If we now allow the two major parties to decide who can participate in the only avenue of mass communication that does not have a prohibitive price tag associated with it, we may just as well return to the smoke filled rooms and let the parties, whose membership does not approach a total of 50% of the electorate, decide who our 'leaders' shall be.

Unfortunately, a generation of 'politics as usual' has caused more than half our eligible voters to accept that, and put us perilously close to losing this democracy which so many of our forebears fought so hard to preserve.

The Carter Center Turns Down Request

November 2, 2000
 
Gary Pelphrey
830 Valleymeade Drive
Marietta, Georgia 30067

Dear Mr. Pelphrey:

Thank your for your recent letter of September 27 requesting that The
Carter Center form a task force and begin a review, with recommendations,
of the US Presidential Campaign and Election, 2000.

As you and I discussed on several occasions, The Carter Center works in
countries around the world to support the process of democratization. In
general, the Center only becomes involved if the major parties welcome our
involvement, if the problems are not being addressed effectively by
others, and if we are contacted with sufficient lead time to develop and
fund an appropriate project or intervention.

Although most of our efforts are focused on emerging democracies in the
developing world, we are also concerned about the quality of democracy in
the United States. In that context, we note the important issues that
your letter raises concerning defects in the US electoral process and in
America's democracy. While we see these as serious issues worthy of
serious attention, we are unable to undertake any actions relevant to the
upcoming elections given our principal focus and the late date of your
request for intervention (only 5 weeks before the elections).

As you may know, the Center recently hosted a conference on "The
Challenges to Democracy in the Americas," which produced several
recommendations for ways the Center and others could work to improve
democracy in the region. One recommendation was to establish an
accountability scorecard to measure progress on various dimensions of
democracy. The Center hopes to move forward with this proposal, and to
use the scorecard as a means to promote a reform agenda for all countries
in the hemisphere, including the U.S.
 

Sincerely,
 
Dr. David Carroll
Associate Director