Jul 11, 2016 3 min read

Take it to the bank. Brandon Hudock will not be Pennsylvania’s next U.S. senator.

The odds the 40-year-old South Strabane Township resident and aspiring independent candidate will be able to triumph over Republican incumbent Pat Toomey or Democratic challenger Katie McGinty in November are vanishingly small, no matter the quality of his platform or the sincerity of his intentions. It’s vastly more probable that there will be simultaneous extraterrestrial and zombie invasions.

But should Hudock appear on the ballot and make his case to the commonwealth’s voters? Absolutely. And recent court rulings have given Hudock a shot at being able to do that.

In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a decision last year by a federal judge that found Pennsylvania’s Election Code was unconstitutional in the hoops it made third-party candidates fly through before they could get on the ballot. Without question, the rules unfairly tilted the playing field toward the two major parties – Republican or Democratic candidates only needed to be the winners of their respective primary contests, where only 2,000 petition signatures are required to get on the ballot. On the other hand, candidates running without a party banner or campaigning under the aegis of the Greens, Libertarians, Socialist Workers or any other small party, were required to get signatures on their petitions equaling 2 percent of the electorate in the last statewide election. That meant they were routinely forced to round up thousands of signatures – as many as 67,000 in 2006.

Then, those signatures were open to fine-tooth-comb scrutiny and legal challenges by one of the major parties if they feared a third-party effort could siphon votes from them. That’s what happened in Pennsylvania in 2004, when Democrats concerned that Green Party nominee Ralph Nader would snatch votes away from their presidential nominee, John Kerry, mounted a successful legal challenge against Nader’s nominating petitions and got him off the ballot. It also ended up costing Nader thousands of dollars in legal bills. The threat of similar legal skirmishes was an effective deterrent for other independent candidates, because none appeared on statewide ballots in 2006, 2010 or 2014.

After the decision by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Stengel last year, Oliver Hall, who directs the Center for Competitive Democracy, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The harm was not just to these candidates, but to all Pennsylvania voters who had no choice but to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. And if there’s one thing voters should have when they get to the polls is, it’s a meaningful choice of candidates.”

Exactly.

The Third Circuit court issued a temporary restraining order reducing the number of signatures needed to 5,000 until the Legislature fashions a more permanent fix. One bill that would reduce the number of signatures to five one-hundredths of 1 percent of the total number of the commonwealth’s registered voters remains mired in a committee in Harrisburg.

Making it punishingly difficult for third-party or independent candidates to appear on the ballot serves no one, except for the two-party duopoly. One thing is for sure – it doesn’t serve democracy.