The following is a guest post from Rob Richie:

Weaponizing Minor Parties: 2024 Edition

By Rob Richie

The presidential election will come down to which candidate wins in the seven swing states – the same closest states from 2020 that again have drawn an overwhelming share of presidential campaign spending and time. Yet every swing state ballot has more than two presidential candidates. Libertarian Chase Oliver is making Republicans nervous due to being on the ballot in all seven states, while anti-abortion activist Randall Terry is on three swing state ballots. Running from the political left, the Green Party’s Jill Stein is on six ballots (all but Nevada), and Cornel West on three. Robert Kennedy Jr. remains on two swing state ballots despite his campaign’s efforts to withdraw his name.

It’s a near certainty that the “tipping point” presidential state will be won without a majority of the vote – just as in six of the last nine presidential elections – and there will be a “Ralph Nader narrative” of a minor party splitting the vote and changing the outcome. Learning from Nader’s impact in 2000, major party donors and operatives have shamelessly sought to benefit from “spoilers” enabled by our dominant plurality, singe-choice voting method. FairVote this year has documented these tactics, while Forbes Magazine provided a valuable overview of a string of major party interventions to boost or block minor presidential candidates based on partisan calculation. I wrote about weaponization of voter choice in a similar guest blog in 2020, but this election has seen new levels of seeking to game our plurality voting rules. 

As a reminder of just how bad it can get, consider a key Florida state senate race in 2020 that helped Republicans reach a supermajority needed to dominate state government. As part of a tactic used in several races. GOP operatives recruited a “ghost candidate” with the same name as the Democratic incumbent to run as an independent. He won more than 6,000 votes in a race won by the Republican by 34 votes. The fact that a key architect of the scheme, former state senator Frank Artiles, was convicted of felonies for his role didn’t change the fact that Republicans got what they wanted.

This year the Democrats have regularly sought to combat and exploit our elections’ spoiler loophole, starting with the Democratic National Committee investing in a full-time office run by Lis Smith focused on minor parties. Democrats helped push No Labels and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the race, then threw a range of legal and administrative obstacles to efforts by Jill Stein and Cornel West to get on ballots and created anti-Stein ads.

Democrats also strategically boosted conservative candidates. Democrats sought to block all minor parties from the Georgia ballot except the Libertarian nominee and Georgian Chase Oliver, while Civic Truth Action, a Super PAC with ties to the Democratic election firm Elias Law Group, recently paid for at least $1.5 million in swing state ads backing Oliver as “ a “true conservative” who will “abolish income taxes” and “dismantle the nanny state.” The New York Times reported on major Democratic spending on behalf of Operation Rescue activist Randall Terry.

Democrats have been active down the ballot as well Consider these headlines

• Dem-linked super PAC boosts third-party candidate in Pennsylvania Senate race (Politico, October 2024)
• Democrats prop up third-party candidates in three House races, (Washington Examiner, October 2024)
• Democratic donors prop up far-right candidates including Wisconsin gun activist in Senate race, (Associated Press, October 2024)
• Conservative group asks FEC to probe effort to promote spoiler candidates, (Associated Press, September 2024)
• A secretive group recruited far-right candidates in key US House races. It could help Democrats, (Associated Press, September 2024)

The Examiner story adds a particularly troubling twist. Alaska has ranked choice voting, a system designed to defang this weaponization of voter choice by giving minor candidate backers the right to indicate backup choices that will count if that candidate is eliminated by finishing last and no candidate wins a majority. Yet the Democratic-linked ad not only lifts up U.S. House candidate John Howe as the “real conservative,” but also urges voters to rank only him – essentially the equivalent of ads telling voters that this year Election Day is on Wednesday.

If not as overtly active up and down the ballot this cycle, Republicans are far from blameless. Donald Trump has called Cornel West “one of my favorite candidates” and said of the Green’s Jill Stein: “I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% from them. He takes 100%.” The GOP has done a range of major spending and litigation to boost both Stein and West, as reported in detail by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Republicans also successfully blocked the Constitution Party from the presidential ballot in the quintessential swing state of Pennsylvania.

The courts may not be immune from calculations about “spoiling” as well. After withdrawing from the race and endorsing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went from a candidate that the Democrats feared to one who might more clearly hurt Trump. Facing similar fact patterns of administrative burdens that would be created by seeking to remove Kennedy from the ballot, the Democratic-controlled state supreme courts in Michigan and Wisconsin ruled that he should stay on the presidential ballot, while conservatives on the North Carolina supreme court ruled he should come off. 

So what can we do about all gaming voter choice? We don’t see anything comparable to it in countries with similar plurality voting systems like Canada and the United Kingdom, so public shaming certainly is warranted. Yet operatives arguably are just playing with the rules our leaders have the power to change. In our era of calcified partisanship and high-stakes elections, there are only so many ways to get an edge – inspiring more voters to go to the polls, changing voters’ minds, or persuading backers of the other party to stay home. In the hunt for new ways to tip close races, I expect steering votes to or away from minor parties to be an escalating tactic in our politics – and one that only deepens voter cynicism.

But we do have the power to change it. Today, voters in Alaska and Maine will vote for president and Congress with ranked choice voting (RCV) and turn the power on whether to “spoil” entirely in the hands of voters. Four more states and the District of Columbia may adopt RCV. Looking forward, we have a choice: resigning ourselves to ongoing escalation of weaponization of voter choice or ending the practice through RCV’s expanded use.

Rob Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.