By Aedan Perry | October 21, 2024
Photo Credit: Aedan Perry / The ASP
Bezos. "Shame!" Boom. Elon. "Shame!" Boom. Harris. "Shame!" Boom.
Between the beat of the drummer and the shaming of public figures, around 60 people gathered in the UAlbany Campus Center on October 3rd to attend a presidential rally. 60 people might seem like a small crowd, but this wasn't a large campaign.
The candidate at the center of it all was Claudia De la Cruz, candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, which is a small political party that describes itself as Marxist-Leninist railing against the political establishment. But there's a problem: She won't be on the ballot this November, at least in New York.
It's been called the most important election of our lifetime. In just under a month, voters will go to the polls and cast their votes for either Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump.
Now, if this were any other state, or any other election, there would be more candidates to choose from. New York is unique this year in being the only state to have only two candidates on the ballot for president; the first such state since Oklahoma in 2012, and the first such election in New York since 1956.
When you ask people about third party and independent candidates this cycle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often comes to mind. Not only were people collecting signatures on his behalf on UAlbany's campus last March, but just last August he was in a courthouse downtown, fighting in vain an effort to get him kicked off the ballot on the grounds that he lied about his residency on his petition forms.
But what about the Libertarian Party? What about the Green Party? Until fairly recently, both appeared on the New York ballot almost every cycle. Kennedy may be perhaps the most prominent case, but candidates like De la Cruz say this isn't the whole story.
"It's impossible to decouple ballot access from voter suppression," she said. "This is the most undemocratic country you could possibly live in."
Ballot access refers to the variety of rules that determine which candidates are allowed to appear on a ballot in a given election. While some states might require candidates to collect tens of thousands of signatures, and have only a few candidates, other states require only a few, or have other more lenient options, and those often have half a dozen or more.
Third party candidates are no stranger to lawsuits over ballot access. De la Cruz herself has lost court cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania this year. While she will still appear on some ballots in Georgia, votes for her there will not count, and Pennsylvania is among the states that won't list her name at all.
The remarkable thing about Kennedy getting kicked off the New York ballot isn't that he was sued, but that he was able to complete New York's petition in the first place.
"A few years ago the requirement for new parties was raised from 15,000 to 45,000 signatures," said UAlbany adjunct political science professor Philip Nicholas Jr., who last month gave a presentation about political parties and interest groups as part of the Rockefeller College's 2024 election series. "The requirement for new parties to retain this status after the election was also raised, from 50,000 votes to 2% of the vote."
The increases to the requirements for petitioning and the vote total to stay qualified were controversial at the time. When the idea of raising the vote test first was floated by Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Party, the New York Times referred to it as Democrats’ Secret Plan to Kill Third Parties in New York.
The changes were initially struck down, with New York Supreme Court in Niagara County deeming that the commission that created the new requirements had been given powers that violated the state constitution. Then-governor Andrew Cuomo simply inserted the changes into his 2020 budget, which then passed with little fanfare, and subsequent lawsuits to overturn the new requirements have all failed.
As a result, only four parties— The Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, and Working Families— managed to survive the 2020 election. The others haven't appeared on a New York gubernatorial or presidential ballot since, with only Kennedy managing to collect enough signatures to meet the 45,000 required.
The four parties then only nominated two presidential candidates this year, taking advantage of New York's system of electoral fusion, which allows candidates to be listed on the ballot lines of multiple parties. 2022 was the first New York gubernatorial race since 1946 to have only two candidates on the ballot, and this year is following suit.
But who in the major parties cares? UAlbany College Republicans member Mike Crow, for one. He attended De La Cruz's rally, afterwards saying, "I love capitalism, but I also love to see other people's views."
He also said that he was unaware that there were only two parties on the ballot this year, as did Nicholas. And those people who are not as politically involved? They might not know about third party campaigns at all.
"I'm not that interested in politics," said sophomore Amit Limaye. "I don't plan on voting, and whenever I see political posts on social media, I always try to scroll past them as quickly as possible. I have heard of Kennedy, but not any of those other candidates."
Even if third parties were on the ballot this fall, this doesn't mean they'd be close to winning here. They are polling at only a few percentage points nationally, and it would take a lot more than that to make a difference in New York.
"When you have Kennedy in the poll it doesn't really seem to change the outcome of the race very dramatically," said Nicholas. "I think that would differ from having Ross Perot running against George H. W. Bush and Clinton— that would change the dynamic."
Polls also rarely explore third party candidates in depth. Take Harvard's biannual youth poll, for instance. Libertarian Party nominee Chase Olver, Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and independent candidate Cornel West are mentioned in a single question, and boast a combined 2% among likely voters. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, on the other hand, are featured in over two dozen questions on the poll. Even Joe Biden, who is not running for president, comes up in more questions than third party contenders.
This general lack of coverage surrounding third parties has not gone unnoticed.
"It should be covered," said Limaye. "The president, the government, and people on social media make it seem like it's not important— It's just not part of the public discourse."
For De la Cruz, becoming part of that discourse is the goal, not winning the election. "We occupy these spaces to say we need fighters," she said to the cheers of the small but impassioned crowd.
Even as a poster telling onlookers to "break the two party system" started to fall off the wall behind her, she continued to spread her message to all who would hear it.
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