Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Paying for Our Own Convention

As I help recruit people to serve as delegates from New York to the 2008 national Green Party Presidential nominating convention in Chicago, I find myself explaining that we have to find people who can afford to pay their own way to attend. Neither our state party nor our national party have sufficient funds to help defray delegate expenses. In contrast, delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions have their expenses paid by US taxpayers. This is just one of the many ways that third parties are disadvantaged in the US electoral system. The general public sees us struggling, but doesn't know the burdens we are struggling under.

According to the Federal Elections Commission website, each major political party is entitled to $4 million (plus cost-of-living adjustments) under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) to finance its national Presidential nominating convention. FECA was first passed in the 1970s, and the cost of living adjustments are now greatly in excess of $4 million. A minor party is eligible for a partial convention subsidy if its candidate received more than five percent of the vote in the previous presidential election.

The disadvantages of our public funding system to third parties are well-stated in the book Two Parties--or More? The American Party System, by John F. Bibby and Louis Sandy Maisel (Westview, 2002), pages 64-65:

"Advocates of a multiparty system are certainly correct in asserting that the Federal Election Campaign Act functions in a manner that benefits the two major parties at the expense of minor parties. Under the FECA, a party is eligible for public funding of its candidate's presidential campaign, provided that the party's nominee in the previous presidential election received the requisite percentage of the popular vote. Major parties—defined under the law as those that received at least 25 percent of the vote in the last presidential election—are entitled to full funding ($67.6 million in 2000) of their candidates' general election campaigns. Minor parties can receive a much smaller allocation of federal funds if they meet the minimum requirement of 5 percent of the vote in the previous election.

"Since it is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances in which the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates do not receive at least one-fourth of the vote, the FECA in effect, seems to guarantee the two major parties a government-subsidized existence in perpetuity. By contrast, even third parties that qualify for public funding do so at a much lower level than the major parties. Thus, the Democratic and Republican nominees in 2000 received a public subsidy of $67.6 million, whereas Pat Buchanan (the Reform party nominee) got $12.6 million. FECA also assists the major parties by funding their national conventions with public funds and providing matching money to their candidates during the pre-convention presidential primaries and state party caucuses to select national convention delegates."