Monday, October 8, 2012

Ballot Access: Exposing a Fatal Flaw.

Here is (more or less), the speech I gave at the Rally for Ballot Access at the Oklahoma State Capitol building on October 8th, 2012:

(I was introduced as Dax Ewbank, a disenfranchised delegate to the Republican National Convention.)

Henry Ford said about his Model T: “You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.” There were practical implications for his limiting the consumers choice in this regard, it turns out black paint dried the fastest and this was necessary for the assembly line process to work.

In seems in Oklahoma we’re attempting to make an assembly line of our elections by saying, "You can have any candidate you'd like as long as they’re Red or Blue". Can you imagine the practical implications of this policy?

In school we laughed when we learned that in communist countries they would be forced to cast a vote for a single candidate. But the joke has been lost on us now, with the simple inclusion of a choice between just two parties.

Now we can claim the people are free to choose, but of course we aren't.  Instead we are forced to choose between just two parties, who too often do not provide enough distinction between each other to constitute a real choice at all. Often times they miss or misrepresent entire issues that are important to the people. In a very real way, our sacred and coveted right to vote has been taken; our voice in our own government has been censored or even silenced.

Many people may point to the party system and place the blame there, and surely much of the blame lies there, they are, of course, the ones who have passed the laws that have restricted our choices.

But I for one am a fan of the party system, just not the two party system. I believe that political parties are very effective ways for people to organize around an ideological platform. People who are passionate about the platform and have time to be active in the party then are able to do the sometimes tedious work of holding meetings and conventions to present to the population a candidate that most closely adheres to the party's stated beliefs. As a person who hasn't always been politically active, it was good to know that there were people out there willing to do this work, so that when the time to vote came, I would know who the candidates were and what they stood for.

No the problem is not with party politics, as unattractive as it sometimes gets, the problem is with the duopoly of power that has been encoded into our law that protects the two major parties

I am a Republican, I want to be a good Republican, but that implies that I believe that Republicans are good. I know our platform is not perfect, and that our party can always improve, but by limiting the conversation within our political discourse we are certainly guaranteeing that improvement will not occur.

Are our convictions so shallow that they cannot withstand the criticism of an opposing viewpoint? And if something in our platform or philosophy cannot withstand honest questioning, should we really keep it? Should we defend it?

Jesus said love your enemies, this was not just a teaching born out of a sacrificial and altruistic call to love, it is also a very practical piece of advice. Sometimes our enemies are the only ones who will tell us the truth, our friends don’t because they want to remain our friends!

When we exclude viewpoints we don't agree with we open ourselves up to be hurt by our own weakness that we are blind to. CS Lewis called it our "fatal flaw”:

“This is the next great step in wisdom–to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs.

It is no good passing this over with some vague, general admission such as “Of course, I know I have my faults.” It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you; something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about”

How are we to become stronger as a nation, a state, a party, or even as individuals if we go out of our way to silence those who disagree with us? Are we not just setting ourselves up to be blindsided by the very weaknesses our opposition is pointing out but that we have chosen to militantly ignore?

Let me paint a scenario for you:

What if Oklahoma's ballot access laws were the most restrictive in the nation, and out of all of the people, parties and candidates in our nation for the office of President of the United states, the choices for Oklahomans were limited to just the two people of the two major parties?

What if those parties, knowing their hold on our ballot was secure, violated their own rules, disenfranchised their own members, and by the influence of a well-funded and powerful national campaign, forced their will upon the membership?

What if they went so far in their national conventions to ignore their own party rules, to ignore the common rules of order, and even to ignore the voting voices of their own membership and script the outcomes they wanted into their teleprompters?

What if the courts ruled that business within the party was not under their jurisdiction?  That the parties were "private clubs" free to govern themselves as they wish. 

What kind of choice would it be for Oklahomans? It would be no choice at all, it will have been decided for us, and we could only blame ourselves because we would have failed to hear those who were pointing out our fatal flaws.

Well this is not a hypothetic situation; this is the reality, particularly in Oklahoma!



The courts cannot legitimately rule that party business is not within their jurisdiction when the parties have a government enforced monopoly on your vote! If the parties are to be free to operate how they please, even violating their own rules and silencing their own membership, then the people must be free to choose from or create new parties so that their voice will be heard. For our society to constantly improve, we cannot have a government that silences criticism and denies ballot access to those that may challenge the status quo.

It’s time to bring freedom back to the land of the free, recognize our fatal flaw and open the polls in Oklahoma!