Jonathan’s Brainscan

Ok, this is interesting. I was looking on Wikipedia to see which “third parties” were the most popular and the results surprised me a bit. Democrats & Republicans first and second; no surprise there. I guessed third was the Libertarian Party. Wrong. This information comes from the publication Ballot Access News and counts how voters in the USA were registered in November of 2006:

1. Democrats with 39.3 million
2. Republicans with 30.6 million
3. Independents (not a party) with 22.8 million
4. Constitution Party at 0.4 million
5. Green Party at 0.3 million
6. Libertarian Party at 0.2 million
7. Reform Party at 0.04 million
8. Natural Law Party at 0.02 million
9. and “other” at 0.7 million

I was mostly familiar with the top six parties but I didn’t even know what the hell the Natural Law Party was. I looked and, well, don’t waste your time. Their website leads you to the “US Peace Government” web page of a group of people who are trying to open 2400 “Peace Palaces” across the USA. Uh, OK.

The Reform Party was the one started by Ross Perot in 1995 for his second run for president. It seemed to consist of people who read Robert’s Rules of Order for fun so squabbles and infighting caused several splits to occur – the American Reform Party, the America First Party and oh, who cares about the rest. You get the idea. In 2005 the state committees from a few states even sued the state committees from some other states.