About as shocking climate change: bill proposed to the Georgia House, would make it easier for independent and third-party candidates to run for office
It should be no surprise that barely-red state Georgia would want more third-party candidates to clog up the polls in the future; look no further than the last, very public and highly scrutinized race for the vacant governorship of the state. Yosemite Sam narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams, 1,978,408 votes to 1,923,685, a difference of 54,723 votes.*
*does not account for all absentee and/or disqualified ballots, the legality of which is another conversation
However, also included in the results was some libertarian schlub, who managed to garner 37,235 votes. Obviously, in a scenario where there were only two parties available to vote from, it is no guarantee that all 37,235 of those votes would definitively have gone blue, but even if like, 60% of them were to have gone blue, it would have forced the election into a run-off situation. Sure, there’s no guarantee that even in a re-vote, the results would have changed, but it might have been a wake-up call to ambivalent Georgians to get off their asses and vote, but if anything at all, it would have kept hope alive, which is something that not just Georgia, but the country as a whole is sorely lacking in these days.
The point is, I very much do believe that the Libertarian party kind of fucked Georgia in the last election, and I wish that they had a modicum of ability to read the room and understand the importance of standing down in a very critical scenario. I seriously don’t believe a single Libertarian candidate over the last two decades have felt that “they’ve got a shot!” when it comes to entering any single political contest, and it was narrow-minded and arrogant, and frankly kind of troll-like for Ted Metz to even bother running in 2018. In an election that literally came down to the wire, the votes that the Libertarians usurped were all wasted, and could very well have helped swing the state not just blue, but denying a low-life like Yosemite Sam from taking office.
So naturally, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all, that the same people who benefited the most from the presence of a third-party most certainly wants more third-parties to get their feet in the door. Because until the Democrats of Georgia can amass enough votes and numbers to overcome all the suppression and tampering and still beat out the Republicans, the presence of third-parties will always be working against them, leading to yet another hurdle for them to overcome in order to try and flip the state.
