Your vote outside the system truly counts

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, January 9, 2005

Letter writer Vera Fredrickson’s Dec. 29 letter, “Independents need to find a candidate,” is a call for somebody who is outside of the system. It seems to have gone largely unnoticed that our own governor’s race was really decided, one way or the other, by people who felt as Ms. Fredrickson does. More than 63,000 voters chose the Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett.

This vote total dwarfs the margin of victory between the establishment candidates. These voters view the old party candidates as two sides of the same coin. They distrust the motives behind the huge amounts of money spent turning professional politicians into nothing more than public servants. They properly placed the blame for our state’s problems, from transportation to housing costs, or corporate welfare to bloated bureaucracy, at the feet of the Democratic and Republican parties who have, after all, been in charge of running our state from the beginning.

Political science has progressed to the point that the electorate is kept polarized at a near optimal 50 percent, simply by using a few hot-button emotional issues. The two old parties have in nearly all other respects morphed into a single, incumbent party. This being the case, I’m of the opinion that a vote outside of the system is the only vote that counts.

Tony Smullin

Everett