AMERICANS ELECT wins third-party spot on California ballot – LATimes
By MB Snow at December 20, 2011 | 12:06 am | Print
Americans Elect, a privately financed group attempting to run a major third-party candidate for the White House, won a spot on California’s 2012 ballot Monday, a milestone in its quest to give voters an alternative to President Obama and his Republican challenger.
California is the 12th state to award Americans Elect a ballot line in the 2012 presidential race. The group hopes its ticket will appear on the ballot in all 50 states. To earn its place on the California ballot, Americans Elect submitted the signatures of more than 1 million registered voters.
An Americans Elect spokeswoman said the group had already won presidential ballot lines in five key electoral states — Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Colorado and Nevada — as well as six others: Utah, Mississippi, Kansas, Arkansas, Alaska and Arizona. Americans Elect plans to nominate its candidates for president and vice president through online balloting in June.
“It is clear that voters are receptive to more choices, more competition, and the reason is that the Democratic and Republican officeholders are not meeting their needs,” said Darry Sragow, a longtime California Democratic strategist who is a senior advisor to the group.
The history of third-party presidential contenders over the last century has been one of failure, even for those who mounted high-profile campaigns: Theodore Roosevelt lost in 1912, George Wallace in 1968, John Anderson in 1980, H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Ralph Nader in every election since 1996.
But they can act as spoilers for either of the two major parties. Perot is widely seen as helping Bill Clinton unseat Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Democrats often accuse Nader of keeping Democrat Al Gore from scoring an electoral college victory over George W. Bush in 2000.
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