Major parties rig the system to exclude competition, marginalize voters and achieve monopoly.

Many factors cause our electoral system to fail, but they have one thing in common. Put simply, the two major parties have rigged the system. By enacting regulations that exclude their competition, the major parties have achieved monopoly power over the majority of American voters. That's what a "safe" district or state is: one party has a monopoly, so voters have no real choice. 90% of our districts and 74% of our states are now one-party monopolies. This uniquely undemocratic feature of American democracy must be addressed if our electoral system is to function properly. As the Commission on Federal Election Reform stated in its 2005 report:

Most other democratic countries have found ways to insulate electoral administration from politics and partisanship by establishing truly autonomous, professional, nonpartisan and independent national election commissions....The United States, too, must take steps to conduct its elections impartially both in practice and appearance. 

This was the conclusion of a bipartisan commission headed by Democratic former President Jimmy Carter and Republican former Secretary of State James Baker. But we don’t need an expert commission to tell us what happens when private political parties run our elections. Here's how the major parties are rigging the system.

Discriminatory Ballot Access Laws
Ballot access laws determine which candidates can run for office. Each state has its own laws, but they all require candidates to collect a certain number of signatures to be listed on the ballot. Some states require only a few hundred or a thousand signatures. Other states require many more – California requires the most at around 160,000. But here's the catch: the major parties who enact these laws exempt themselves, so only minor party and independent candidates have to comply. This gives the major parties an incentive to make discriminatory ballot access laws more restrictive than necessary to maintain orderly elections.

Not surprisingly, ballot access requirements keep going up. In the 1920s a new party could get its entire slate of candidates on the ballot in all 50 states with only 50,000 signatures. Today nearly 1,000,000 signatures are required. Candidates who want to challenge the major parties also have to comply with 50 different sets of complex procedural requirements, and any minor technical error can disqualify a candidate. What's worse, a major party Secretary of State invariably determines whether challenging candidates qualify. Discriminatory ballot access laws thus provide the major parties with a means of excluding any candidate who threatens their monopoly.

Redistricting and Gerrymanders
Redistricting is the process by which legislators divide the nation into electoral districts. Gerrymandering occurs when legislators draw districts that collect their supporters and dilute the opposition, effectively guaranteeing the party in power a victory in the next election. Gerrymanders thus turn the idea of democracy upside down. Voters are supposed to choose candidates, not the other way around. Yet gerrymandering is standard operating procedure for incumbents today. Every time Congress draws a new electoral map, more safe districts result, and more incumbents are guaranteed to win their next election. That’s why 90% of the nation’s electoral districts are now monopolies.

The Electoral College
37 of 50 states are one-party monopolies in our presidential elections. This is because the president is not actually elected by the American people, but by the Electoral College. Under this system, each state has a certain number of electors, whom the people vote for, and whichever candidate wins the popular vote in each state wins the state's electors. The first candidate to win a majority of the nation's electors wins the election. This "winner-take-all" feature of the Electoral College is what produces one-party monopoly states. Candidates have no incentive to compete in states where polls show one candidate is likely to win, because the Electoral College provides no reward for second-place candidates, even if they win 49% of the vote. The major parties didn't create the Electoral College, but they are responsible for its winner-take-all operation, and this is what enables them to to divide the nation into Red and Blue "safe" states.

The Presidential Debates 
The presidential debates used to be sponsored by the independent, nonpartisan League of Women Voters. But in 1988 the Republicans and Democrats jointly formed an organization called the Commission on Presidential Debates. This partisan body now determines the ground rules of each debate, including which candidates may participate. Every election, the Republicans and Democrats sign a Memorandum of Understanding that lays out the rules. One of the first rules of the 2004 memo stated, “The parties agree that they will not...appear at any other debate...with any other candidate.” Another rule required the audience of the "Town Hall" debate to be comprised entirely of Republicans and Democrats. No one else was allowed to attend, and no other candidates were allowed to debate, even though most Americans want to hear from them. The major party candidates weren't even allowed to ask each other questions. Thus the debates have become just another photo-op for the major party candidates. Important issues are ignored, points of disagreement are few, and Americans lose a rare opportunity to see presidential candidates think on their feet.

The Price of Admission
Any candidate still willing to run for office in this system faces one more obstacle, which is perhaps the most daunting. The cost of running for office has skyrocketed. On average, candidates for the U.S. House spent over $1 million in 2004, and Senate candidates spent more than $7 million. In the most expensive races, the major party candidates spent a combined $9 million and $36 million, respectively. The major party presidential candidates meanwhile spent more than $650 million. The vast majority of Americans simply cannot afford this price of admission.

The systematic exclusion of all but the richest candidates from our elections has come to be known as the wealth primary. The wealth primary was ushered in by the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley v. Valeo, wherein the Court equated money with speech and therefore struck down campaign spending limits as unconstitutional. The upshot of Buckley is that fundraising has become a kind of political arms race - a never-ending pursuit for more and more campaign cash. The stakes are high, because the candidate who spends the most money almost always wins the election. The spate of scandals emanating from Washington illustrate the lengths to which politicians will go to win this arms race.

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