The heart of the Democrats’ campaign for president this year is their full-throated attack on Donald Trump as a dictatorial ultrarightist. The Washington Post headlined Catherine Rampell’s Sept. 24 column, “Don’t scoff at the Hitler comparisons. Trump’s rhetoric is that bad.” Democrats claim no less than “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024.

The Militant
By Terry Evans
October 7, 2024

But at the same time, they’re driving to get third parties and independent candidates thrown off the ballot across the country. This is an assault on the constitutional right to be able to vote for the candidate of your choice.

For decades the Democratic and Republican parties have passed laws, including daunting petitioning requirements, to try to keep the Socialist Workers Party and others who aren’t candidates of the bosses’ two main parties off the ballot. Or, if the petitions meet the requirement, to find technicalities to try to do the job.

According to the Aug. 1 Ballot Access News, “Eight minor party and independent presidential candidates are facing challenges to their ballot access. This is the highest number of such candidates in history.” It points out that “the overwhelming number of challenges so far have been filed by Democrats.”

They’re denouncing “third party” candidates in increasingly shrill tones.

The Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is “predatory,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted Sept. 1, because “all you do is show up every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off.” She doesn’t mention that people are “justifiably pissed off” because neither the Democrats nor Republicans offer a road forward for working people.

New York Times commentator Gail Collins claims Stein’s 2016 campaign was responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump that year and the Green’s Ralph Nader candidacy in 2000 for Al Gore’s defeat by George W. Bush. Stein “really ought to be doing something else” with her life, Collins says.

The Democrats’ drive to limit the ballot is especially fierce in what they call “swing” states.

On Sept. 20 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn a Nevada court ruling tossing Stein off the ballot. Stein’s campaign had met all Nevada’s petitioning requirements, collecting 10,000 signatures. But an official in the secretary of state’s office had sent the Green Party the wrong sample affidavit that so-called minor parties are obligated to submit for the people who collect their signatures. They sent the sample that’s required for putting referenda on the ballot, not the one for candidates.

The Greens used the paperwork they were sent, and Democrats got a compliant court to rule her off the ballot, despite acknowledging that the mistake had in fact been made by the state. With polls currently showing Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck in Nevada, Democrats were desperate to stop candidates they think will siphon votes away from Harris.

In Pennsylvania, another “swing state,” Democrats have won lawsuits throwing presidential candidates Cornel West, an African American academic who’s listed as an independent, and Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, off the ballot.

In Georgia, the state Supreme Court Sept. 15 put a hold on an order by two lower court judges throwing West and de la Cruz off the ballot there. The ruling means their names will be printed on paper ballots, but the high court still has to rule on whether their votes will be counted.

Over the years, petitioning requirements for parties other than the Democrats and Republicans, the capitalist rulers’ two main parties, have been made more and more onerous. Today a presidential candidate designated as independent by state authorities in California must turn in 219,403 valid signatures.

With an eye toward future deepening class struggle, these restrictions are in place to make it as difficult as possible for the working class to break from the rulers’ two-party shell game and organize our own party, a party of labor, to challenge the employers, their parties and governments for political power.

All attacks on ballot access — including for third-party capitalist candidates like Stein and West — should be opposed.