The us is a military dictatorship effectively ruled, by powerful lobbies and huge amounts of bribes, including
the arms industry and the israeli lobby.
every presidential election, the "mass media" relentlessly promotes two candidates who have deep WarParty credentials
and represent the status quo i.e endless wars overseas and massive surveillance and incarceration at home...
considering these two candidates as minor variations in a one-party state, they have managed is gather a whopping
98.1 % of the vote..
furthermore, getting on the ballot if you are not part of the WarParty apparatus is very difficult
"The Democratic Party is spending millions of dollars on lawyers, operatives and propaganda to ensure that workers and youth will have no choice in the 2024 US presidential election except Joe Biden, responsible for the genocide in Gaza, and Donald Trump, the aspiring dictator.
In the last two weeks, major articles published in the media have spelled out the Democratic Party’s plan to block, to the extent possible, any third party or independent candidates from appearing on the ballot this November. This includes the Socialist Equality Party campaign of Joseph Kishore and Jerry White.
The media reports employ the language of a military offensive, referring to the “all-out war” the party is preparing, the “army of lawyers” it is mobilizing, the “state-by-state counterinsurgency plan” that it is implementing.
It is not broadly understood, including by workers in the United States, how deeply undemocratic the American electoral system actually is.
The number of signatures third parties are required to gather in some states is colossal: 219,403 in California, 145,040 in Florida, 113,151 in Texas, 82,452 in North Carolina, 45,000 in New York, 43,000 in Arizona, 36,944 in Indiana, 25,000 in Illinois, 23,737 in Oregon, and at least 10,000 in Massachusetts, Missouri, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina and Colorado. Collectively, independent candidates and third parties would have to gather over 900,000 signatures to get on the ballot in every state and Washington D.C.
Furthermore, in order to overcome the Democrats’ and Republicans’ ruthless challenges to the signatures collected, third parties are compelled to gather at least 50 percent more than the official requirement, or roughly 1.5 million signatures nationally. In contrast, getting on the ballot nationally in Russia—constantly denounced by the American media as the most authoritarian and undemocratic country in the world—requires the gathering of 100,000 signatures.
These measures have been implemented by both parties with the specific aim of excluding left-wing opposition to their domination. As ballot access expert Richard Winger has noted, many of the most onerous requirements were enacted after the 1930s, during the Great Depression and in the period that followed, to prevent the Communist Party and other left-wing parties from getting on the ballot.
Between 1929 and 1960, 10 states “drastically” increased ballot restrictions, Winger notes in his essay, “How Ballot Access Laws Affect the U.S. Party System,” while only three states opened up access. Between 1961 and 1983, this process accelerated, with 25 states restricting ballot access.
The Democratic Party is spending millions of dollars on lawyers, operatives and propaganda to ensure that workers and youth will have no choice in the 2024 US presidential election except Biden and Trump.
www.wsws.org
