Current Events

Alyson Wyckoff
Give Third Parties a Voice
Terry Michael
USA Today
8/21/12
This article is about how the minor parties do not have a voice in the presidential debates. Terry Michael goes on to say that the voters are manipulated not engaged and that if the minor parties, specifically the libertarians and greens, were given time to talk during the debates that this would change the elections. The third parties would have more votes. Last Terry Michael comes up with a solution to this problem he says the networks could offer five minutes each after the Romney and Obama acceptance speeches, and the libertarians and greens be the only ones to speak they have the best chance at actually getting on the ballot.

This whole article is bias because you can clearly tell that Terry Michael wants the third parties to be heard in the elections. Even at the end of the article it says that Terry Michael has endorsed Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. I feel that the authors strengths are explain when the official debates started and how they work so that the reader can understand why third parties are not in the debates. Third parties are not in the debates because they have to poll at least fifteen percent and they cannot get that if they do not have news coverage. This article relates to minor parties because Terry Michael talks about the green and libertarian party. These two parties are under the ideological parties. This means that they care more about principle than winning the election. They just want their views to be heard. This also relates to why we cannot have a multiparty system. If we were to have more equally fitted competitors against the democrats and republicans we would have even lower voter turnout because people are already experiencing ballot fatigue this would just increase it more. Lastly the winner take all system, even if minor parties got enough air time to get their views across they would not be able to get enough votes for them to get all of...