Many people are aware that our electoral system is biased in favor of the two dominant parties and against smaller parties, but the campaign of Gentry Lange, this year's Green Party candidate for King County Executive, provides a useful case study of just how bad that bias really is.

Simply filing for office this year was doubly complicated for independent and minor party candidates due to a change of rules just before the late-July filing deadline. On July 15, the new primary election system adopted by the Legislature was overturned in court. New emergency rules were adopted that now required a nominating convention for all independent and minor party candidates. Normally such a convention would be held in the month prior to the filing deadline, but this year, because of the last minute changes, the period for holding nominating conventions was not until three weeks after the filing deadline. (A new Aug. 26 filing deadline was created for candidates subject to this new requirement.) Meanwhile, the media announced 2005 candidacies based on the July filings, thus excluding all minor parties and independents.

Thus ignored from the start, the campaigns for Lange and other minor party candidates were shortened by a month by delayed filing. Additionally, all such candidates were excluded from the primary election voters' guide, since their spots on the November ballot were guaranteed by their nominating conventions, rather than by primary election. (All major party candidates were listed in the primary voters' guide, even if they were unopposed in the primary.) So, as of the Sept. 20 primary, the majority of voters had no way of knowing that anyone who was not a Democrat or Republican was running for office in November.

Of course, extra-industrious citizens could always do some extra research and find all the candidates on the King County elections website, right? Wrong.

Despite having filed for office in August, Gentry Lange was not listed as a candidate for executive until mid-October, halfway between the Sept. 20 primary and the Nov. 6 general election.

The consequences of this omission are inestimable. Immediately after the primary, all civic groups that follow elections begin planning their endorsement interviews and candidate forums. Without Lange's candidacy listed in the official public record, these groups understandably excluded him from their invitation lists. Lange's campaign became preoccupied with sleuthing out these events and asking to be invited, something you can bet the more well-heeled campaigns never had to do.

A mutually reinforcing cycle quickly takes hold in these situations: Getting excluded from one forum makes you all the more likely to be excluded from the next, with each venue using lack of visibility in prior venues to justify the perception that the campaign is "low-profile" and "not serious."

KCTS-TV announced that on Oct. 20 the first televised debates between King County Executive candidates would be held. Lange, predictably, was not initially invited, but a concerted campaign of public pressure by Greens and their allies (including Libertarians and the Freedom Socialist Party--strange bedfellows indeed!) caused KCTS to reconsider and include Lange after all. He was not so lucky with the KING 5 debate the following week.

Curiously, KING 5 excluded Lange based on its "objective criteria" that a candidate must get over 5 percent in polls conducted more than 30 days before the election. This is curious because KING 5 commissioned the first non-partisan poll in the race on Oct. 3 (i.e., more than 30 days before the Nov. 8 election). But Lange was not included in the poll. Anyone polled who, unprompted, named Lange as candidate of choice was officially categorized as "Undecided."

Lange was finally included in a KING 5 poll released Oct. 17. Despite the total information blackout of his campaign at that point, he still polled 7 percent. But KING 5 steadfastly excluded Lange from its debate, claiming its criteria required a candidate to poll above 10 percent less than 30 days from election day. Hmmm...

Televised debates can make all the difference for dark horse candidates, notes Mike Gillis, Seattle Green Party coordinating council member. Gillis, who organized the successful campaign to get Lange into the KCTS debate, points out that Ross Perot was polling just 7 percent when invited into the 1992 presidential debates, and that Jesse Ventura was polling just 10 percent before his first debate in the 1998 Minnesota governor's race. Ventura credits his victory in that race to his initial debate exposure.

The pattern of exclusion continued with the Seattle daily papers--both the Times and the P-I refused to interview Lange for endorsement consideration.

October polling did finally garner Lange a scant bit of media attention, but it was only for the role his campaign might play as a "spoiler" in a race that then appeared very close. Would Lange be the "Ralph Nader" of this race? (Lange replied that being compared to Nader was certainly no insult.) His platform of voting reform and transportation solutions was mostly ignored. (Lange worked alongside Bev Harris and Andy Stephenson to help expose the problems with "black box voting" and other problems that come with private control over the most fundamental of all public processes and was campaigning to draw attention to the privatization of voting in King County under Sims.)

At every step, Lange's campaign (like many other independent and minor party campaigns) was systematically excluded, marginalized, and distorted. Most voters, if they'd heard anything at all about him, only knew him as the guy who could never win but might help elect a nasty Republican to office. Still, Lange garnered almost 5 percent of the vote. (And the race turned out to be not nearly as close as pundits had predicted.)

Imagine an election system that provides a level playing field for all candidates, that fairly represents a variety of points of view, and that allows voters to support the candidate they most agree with without fear that it will help elect the candidate they least agree with. Such a system, unlike our current exclusionary process, would deserve to be called a democracy, that shining ideal that President Bush claims to want to impose on nations around the world.

Democracy in America: Still worth fighting for.