Monthly Archive for New Jersey
New Jersey Stories Posted in October 2008
The Aussie ballot keeps voters down under
Category: Ballot Access · State: New Jersey Oklahoma · Source: NewJersey.com
They used to call him "the man with the golden arm."
Nick Caputo was the Essex County clerk for 29 years. Among the clerk's duties was the task of putting capsules representing the political parties into a drum and then giving it a good spin. Apparently Caputo had calculated that centrifugal force would keep the capsules in place. And the Democrats got Row A for all but one year of his tenure.
Meanwhile, over in Hudson County the choice was made by picking Ping-Pong balls at random. But if a smart pol put the Democratic ball in the freezer overnight, it was Row A all the way.
Such are the drawbacks of the Australian ballot. That's the technical name for the type of government-created ballot that's been in use in America since the 1880s. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But the Australian ballot made all sorts of mischief possible. Worse, it solidified a two-party system that gives us no real choice at the polls. On Tuesday, Americans get to choose between the big-government party and the bigger-government party. Which is which? It's hard to tell these days.
This is fine for liberals, but conservatives have nowhere to go, except to a third-party candidate who has no real chance of winning. That's no accident, says J. David Gillespie, a semi-retired political science professor from Charleston, S.C., and author of "Politics at the Periphery: Third Parties in Two-Party America."....
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