Voters often wonder why they find so few choices on the ballot.
Is it because candidates aren't interested in running?
Or because they don't try hard enough to qualify for the ballot?
Maybe.
Sometimes.
But often the explanation is that those in charge of enacting and enforcing state ballot access laws -- Republicans and Democrats -- do everything in their power to suppress their potential competitors.
Much of this happens behind the scenes: new laws or rules are quietly enacted, out of public view, decision-makers are coaxed or coerced, and courts conveniently look the other way so that accountability never comes.
You will not find a more detailed and comprehensive account of how the major parties do it than this article CCD Advisory Board member and law professor Mark Brown recently published in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.
Brown writes:
Ohio regressed to its major-party monopoly by the 2022 election cycle—thanks to the Ohio Republican Party. It did so not only through anti-competitive legislation passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly, but also through political machinations and electoral manipulations practiced by Ohio’s ostensibly impartial elections officials. Executive fiats perpetrated by Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted and defended by Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine had as much to do with closing Ohio’s ballots as the General Assembly’s new draconian rules.
Brown was a first-hand witness to much of this activity and in his article he brings receipts.
For another detailed account of how the major parties actively suppress political competition -- this time involving a massive criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Democratic Party operatives in Pennsylvania -- see this Harvard Law Record article by CCD counsel Oliver Hall.
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