Q&A with Gary Swing | Veteran minor party candidate advocates for … – coloradopolitics.com

Gary Swinghas run for office on minor party tickets a dozen times in three states since 1996 and is seeking the Colorado Unity Party's nomination on next year's ballot in the 3rd Congressional District.

The 55-year-old Boulder resident and Colorado Unity Party state secretary hasn't won any of the elections he's competed in, but tells Colorado Politics he continues to run to bring attention to issues given short shrift by the major parties. He's also making a point about representation, arguing that the country's current election system, dominated by the Democratic and Republican parties, leaves many voters without a meaningful voice in their government.

Swing supports a move from winner-take-all, single-member districts toward proportional representation, which would allow voters who make up a small percentage of the electorate to have a representative on legislative bodies, from city council to state legislatures and Congress.

Over the years, Swing has run for state representative, the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate and president under a variety of banners, most often affiliated with the Green Party, but lately as the nominee of the Unity Party following a break with the Colorado Greens. (The Green and Unity parties are two of Colorado's seven officially recognized minor political parties, a list that also includes the Libertarians and the American Constitution Party.)

In 2020, Swing filed to run in Vermont as the Boiling Frog Party candidate for president. Later that year, he appeared on ballots in Colorado as the Unity Party's nominee in the 2nd Congressional District. He was the minor party's nominee for Colorado secretary of state last year. He finished in fifth place with less than 0.5% of the vote, behind Jena Griswold, the Democratic incumbent, who won, followed by the Republican, the Libertarian and the American Constitution Party nominee, but ahead of the Approval Voting Party candidate.

Swing grew up in New Jersey and describes himself as a lifelong pacifist and advocate for nonviolence. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science and a masters in public administration from the University of Colorado. He's a spokesperson for the Boulder-based Best Democracy organization and a former national advisory board member for theCenter for Voting and Democracy, which since changed its name to FairVote, but leftthe group when it focused on promoting ranked choice voting instead of proportional representation.

When he isn't politicking, Swing gets in his steps in a big way. He's completed the triple crown of backpacking completing theAppalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail and hiked the entireColorado Trail, Arizona Trail, Ouachita Trail, Ozark Highlands Trail and Lone Star Trail. He's also hiked to the highest point in all 64 Colorado counties and climbed all 637 Colorado mountains over 13,000 feet.

Our interview with Swing has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Colorado Politics: The Colorado Libertarians recently came to an agreement with the state GOP not to put up candidates in competitive races, in an attempt avoid being a spoiler, if they consider the Republican nominee sufficiently liberty-minded, and you responded by saying that the Colorado Unity Party welcome spoilers and candidates of all kind. How does the Libertarians' and Republicans' deal figure in third-party politics here in Colorado?

Gary Swing: I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, but it's really not legitimate for a recognized political party to tell members that they can't seek the party's nomination for any office. That's for the voters to decide, and ultimately, it's up to the members of Libertarian Party themselves to decide whether or not to run a candidate.

Under state law, any candidate who gets at least 30% of the vote at a party assembly qualifies for a primary ballot. If a person is really determined to run for office as a candidate of any recognized party, they can bypass the party assembly and petition on their primary ballot. The only way to stop someone from running on the party's ballot line would be for another candidate to defeat them in a primary. Of course, in 2019, Democratic state legislators vastly increased the number of petition signatures needed for independent candidates and candidates for minor party primaries. Now it's much harder for someone to go around minor party nominating process.

CP: You're the state secretary for the Unity Party, and you're seeking the Unity Party nomination in the 3rd Congressional District. What brought you to the Unity Party after running with the Greens for so long?

Swing:I have a long history of involvement with the Green Party, mostly in Colorado, some in Arizona and elsewhere. I was on the ballot seven times overall as a Green Party candidate. The Green Party in Colorado was taken over by a faction that has systematically purged many former Green Party candidates, activists, organizers and local chapters from the right to participate. The Greens are seeking to exclude as many people as possible from their process. The Unity Party has a process that's pretty much the opposite.

The Unity Party was started as a centrist party, but it has evolved into an organization that celebrates diversity and inclusion. We offer an open and democratic process for political independents and free thinkers to seek our nomination and get on the ballot for county, state or federal offices in Colorado. In the last two general elections, the Unity Party was in fourth place after the Libertarian Party for the most candidates on Colorado's ballot. We had 12 candidates in Colorado the ballot in 2020 and eight in 2020. The Unity Party describes itself as neither left nor right, but we welcome potential candidates from across the political spectrum to pitch their own campaign message at our nominating assembly.

It takes 30% of the vote that are assembling to qualify for a primary ballot. So far, we've avoided holding a contested primary. If one of our candidates doesn't place first for nomination, we encourage them to put their name in for a different office. The Unity Party is a party of friendship. We try to treat each other with respect. Our mission statement says as members of the Unity Party, we focus on similarities rather than differences. We are nonpartisan. We are a blending of diverse parties, political ideals, cultures, sexualities and genders, religions, spiritual practices, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. We welcome progressives, conservatives, outliers, nonconformists and those from all political parties.

The Unity Party does have members across the country, but we only have ballot status as a recognized political party in Colorado. That means we're able to nominate candidates for all offices by party assembly. We encourage people to come out and seek our nomination. We'd like to recruit more women or people of color to run as candidates.

The United States has always had a political system that's been heavily dominated by white male conservatives, and we still see that today in the Republican Party. We see that in pretty much all alternative parties. Frankly, the Democrats are really the most diverse party in the United States right now. But still, the United States lags behind most of the world in representation of women or people of color, and also alternative parties in government. We want to give people who feel excluded from the political process an opportunity to participate, to get their message out and to take a stand for what they believe in.

I first thought about joining the Unity Party when I was on the Appalachian Trail hiking [it] for the second time. I was reading a book about Nelson Mandela trying to achieve unity in a post-apartheid South Africa, and I thought that his message of unity in diversity was was a good message, and that the United States and South Africa have a similar history of white supremacy racism, slavery in the United States, apartheid in South Africa and we have a long way to go in overcoming the disparities that resulted from a systematic racial discrimination.

CP: What do you see the role of minor parties and independent candidates in Colorado as being?

Swing: Minor political parties inject new ideas and diversity of perspectives into politics, and we can shift the debate on issues. Alternative parties offer a different perspective to voters. It gives them an opportunity to support to vote for someone other than the two establishment parties on a ballot that tends to be a limited choice between candidates you may not support.

I've said before, everyone owns their own vote; no one is entitled to a person's vote. Democrats often say that you must vote for Democrats in order to preserve democracy. And yet, Democrats in Colorado and elsewhere try to keep independent, alternative party candidates off the ballot through restrictive ballot access laws.

Under the winner-take-all voting system, it's true, minor party candidates really have very little representation in government. There are more than 519,000 elected offices in the United States, including small local offices. Less than one out of 1,000 offices in the United States is held by a member of a party other than the Democrats and the Republicans. There are more than 7,000 state legislative seats in the country. Almost all of them are held by Democrats and Republicans.

Libertarians are the third largest party, but they only have one state representative, in Vermont, and that was someone who was elected as a Republican and then switched after they were elected to become a Libertarian Party member. The Green Party is the fourth largest party in the country, and they currently have no members of any state legislature in the United States. They've only four times elected a Green Party member as a state legislator, and in every case it was under unusual circumstances. So it's very difficult to actually get elected to partisan office in the United States under the winner-take-all voting system as a candidate of a party other than the Democrats or Republicans.

CP:You ran as the Green Party nominee for the U.S. Senate in Arizona in 2016 against John McCain and Anne Kirkpatrick, on the "boiling frog party" theme, is that right?

Gary Swing, wearing a "Save the Frogs" T-shirt, poses for a photograph in front of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.

Swing:I created a website with a satirical campaign message, and I ended up getting 5.5% of the vote, 138,634 votes, which was the highest percentage and highest number of votes cast for any Green candidate for any U.S. Senate seat out of the last six general elections.

One of my favorite things about being a political candidate has been injecting some humor into politics, which tends to be toxic and nasty. When I ran as a Green candidate, I tended to have a serious, straightforward platform. My Green Party campaigns for U.S. representative and state representative were prescriptive message campaigns focusing on policy proposals. When I ran satirical campaigns as a "boiling frog party" candidate for U.S. Senate and for president in Vermont in 2020, my message was focused on describing the reality of the harm that human impact has had on the ecosystem.

My message as a boiling frog party candidate went beyond what I felt comfortable saying as a Green Party candidate. Human overpopulation and overconsumption has resulted in the mass extinction of animal species over the past 200 years, human beings and livestock have largely displaced about 96% of the biomass of global wildlife mammal species. The mass of plastic now outweighs all animal life on Earth. The amount of human-made material outweighs plant and animal life on Earth. Human beings are just one of millions of species in an interdependent web of life, yet an industrialized human civilization of 8 billion people has created a toxic artificial environment.

CP:Do you think people heard your message, running what you call a satirical, zero-dollar campaign?

Swing: It's hard to gauge that, really. I did get some press in the Phoenix newspaper, I had a website, I had a page with a candidate statement on secretary of state's website, but it's really hard to know how many people voted for me just because I was the only other candidate who wasn't a Democrat or a Republican on the ballot, and how many people might have actually gotten to hear my message.

CP:Did you feel like you were a spoiler?

Swing: No, not at all. It was a landslide reelection for John McCain. He was a former Republican nominee for president, it was clear from the beginning that he was going to win reelection. I was surprised two years later when the US Senate election was so close for [Democrat] Kyrsten Sinema,

CP: In 2018, you helped recruit Angela Green to run for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, and she got attention as a potential spoiler.

Swing: That's right. I reached out to Angela Green. I saw that Angela Green had filed as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate because I was following filings with the secretary of state's office down there. Her message was that she wanted to legalize marijuana, she made a statement, "Make love not war." Her candidate statement seemed like it was a moderate version of the Green Party's message, which now has moved pretty far to the left.

I wrote to her and I said, "You're not going to get on the ballot, you're not going to make much headway running as a Democrat." But under the quirky situation, they have in Arizona, if you file as a write-in candidate for an uncontested primary for a new political party, which legally the Green Party was at that time, you only need to get more write-in votes than any other candidate to qualify for the general election ballot with the party's nomination. And as a result of my writing to her, she switched from the Democrats to the Greens. She was the only candidate to file and got on the ballot as a Green Party candidate.

It was her first campaign I think she wasn't prepared for what happened. She made national headlines when the election was so close, with people calling her a spoiler, trying to intimidate her into dropping out of the election. There was a lot of bullying and harassment going on. And I felt sad that she was subjected to all of that, and I wasn't sure that she was prepared for the reaction that people had to her simply being a candidate not necessarily (to) anything she said, but people were angry that she had the audacity simply to file as a candidate for public office.

I think there should be more candidates from more parties on the ballot, not just two candidates, and not just three or four. I'd like to see 20 candidates or 30 candidates on the ballot, like they have in Australia. And if we had a proportional representation voting system, then you wouldn't have to worry about the idea of spoiling an election for a candidate who might be a little closer to your position than the other major party candidate.

Alternative party candidates don't take votes away from major party candidates. Major party candidates take votes away from alternative party candidates. No one says, "Oh, the Democrat can't possibly win, I'm going to vote for the Green Party candidate instead." But they do the opposite for the Democrats. People who vote for alternative party candidates are either expressing their true preference, or they're expressing a protest vote against the establishment candidates who they feel don't represent them.

The Democrats and Republicans should campaign for people's votes rather than trying to convince other candidates that they must drop out or else they'll threaten to spoil on election for one of the establishment parties.

CP:You've long been an advocate for proportional representation, and are not a fan of instant runoff, or ranked-choice voting. Colorado also has the Approval Voting Party. What do you see as the advantages of proportional voting over these other methods of conducting elections?

Swing:All single-winner voting methods exclude political minorities from representation. The term ranked-choice voting is often used to refer to a winner-take-all voting method, also known as instant runoff voting. This is a ranked voting method, single member districts. Ranked voting could also be used in multi-member districts to provide proportional or semi proportional representation.

The more seats that are elected in a district, the more inclusive and fully representative results are; however, the ballot also becomes longer and more unwieldy. The election reform group Best Democracy proposes to elect Colorado's state legislature by hybrid proportional representation: 80% of Colorado's state legislators would be elected from seven-member districts using a single transferable vote method of ranked-choice voting. Under this system, it would take about 12.5% of the vote to elect a state representative to a multi-member district seat. To make the system more inclusive, the remaining 20% of seats would be leveling seats elected from party lists.

Any party that gets at least 3% of the party list vote would win seats from the party list. Overall representation in the legislature would be proportional to the party list vote. This should produce a state legislature with about eight to 10 parties represented, not just two parties. About 98% of voters would be able to elect representatives of their choice.

Everyone should be able to elect representatives of their choice. That's the point of proportional representation. Ninety-five countries use some form of proportional representation to elect legislators.

Proportional representation makes every vote count. No minor party has been elected to Congress since since 1970. Green Party candidates have been running in the U.S. since 1985, Libertarian candidates been writing since 1972, and yet, we have no Green Party or Libertarian Party candidates holding any statewide office, only one Libertarian state legislator, less than one out of 1,000 seats. If the United States used a party list system of proportional representation, a party supported by 5% of votes should now have at least 22 U.S. representatives and at least 369 seats in state legislatures. Proportional representation provides better representation for women, racial minorities and smaller parties in government.

CP:Short of changing the whole system, are there some changes Colorado can make in the near future to better reflect the will of the voters, to move toward what you're talking about?

Swing:In 2019 and in 2021, Democrats in the Colorado state legislature passed broad-based election reform packages that included provisions to vastly increase the number of petition signatures required for independent candidates to get on the ballot in Colorado, and also to end the filing fee option for independent candidates for president, which will vastly reduce the number of options that people have on the ballot for president in 2024 and future elections, if that stands.

The United States generally has some of the worst ballot access laws in the world. Colorado had some better ballot access laws from 1995 until 2019, because a coalition of political parties, the Colorado Coalition for Fair and Open Elections, successfully lobbied the state legislature to make ballot access easier for independent candidates and for alternative parties.

I would like to see the Colorado state legislature repeal the changes that were passed to make it harder for independent candidates to get on the ballot and, in fact, to move in the opposite direction to make it easier. I think the filing fee option for president was a good idea. It used to take $1,000 to put an independent presidential ticket on a ballot in Colorado. We do tend to have too many people run for top offices, but I'd like to see the filing fee option extended to all offices in Colorado say, $1,000 for president, $500 for other statewide offices, $200 for a U.S. representative, $100 for the state legislature, maybe $50 for county offices. That would make it easier for more people to participate in the political process.

Secretary of State Jenna Griswold has said that she wants everyone's voice to be heard, including unaffiliated voters, and yet she helped craft and lobby for legislation to suppress unaffiliated candidates. Colorado Senate President Stephen Fenberg, who represents the district where I live currently, he says that everyone should have a seat at the table, yet he carried Senate Bill 21-250 to keep independent presidential candidates off Colorado's ballot. He was also the Senate sponsor for the Colorado Votes Act. House Bill 19-1278, which restricts petitioning for independent candidates.

The Democrats are really the party that represents political minorities, women, people who have historically felt excluded from the political process, and the Democrats dominate both houses of the state legislature, they dominate statewide offices. I'd like to see some Democratic legislators come out and say, "Well, we didn't support this, it was part of a broad package of election reform changes." So I'd like to see someone from the Democratic side of the legislature, preferably, introduce a bill to repeal the ballot access restrictions and improve ballot access for independent candidates for elections. Anyone in the legislature could do it, but the Democrats have a supermajority right now.

CP: You've been running for office since 1996, is that right? What motivates you to keep doing this?

Gary Swing poses for a photograph on Springer Mountain, Georgia, at the end of a southbound hike on the Appalachian Trail.

Swing: Every time I run, I say this is the last time I'm going to be a candidate. Politics is toxic. I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall. And yet, I'm still frustrated with the system.

I started out running as a candidate because I wanted to be an anti-war message candidate. Back in 1996, the Green Party of Colorado encouraged me to run for the smallest partisan office I could, and run to win. So I ran for state representative, which in Denver was the smallest partisan office I could run for. And I put a lot of effort into that campaign, and I got 8.5% of the vote in a three-way race. The Republican candidate, I think, was nominated last minute and really was just a line-holder, but not much more than that, and got 13.5% of the vote. It was the most heavily Democratic, least Republican district in the entire state, and walking door to door, trying to run a serious campaign, being in candidate forums, being in voter education guides, distributing literature door to door, I still got just 8.5% of the vote as a Green Party candidate. It was better than any other independent or third party candidate in the state running against both a Democrat and Republican. Still, it's a tiny minority of the vote.

At some point, I'll say I've had enough, I'm done doing this. But one thing or another happens, like when I was kicked out of the Green Party in Colorado. If someone tells me I can't do something that makes me want to do it. If someone tries to bully or exclude you from participation, that creates more motivation to say, "I'm going to do it anyway." So that's part of my my argument against the spoiler effect. If you tell people they can't run for office because they're going to spoil an election, that's just going to motivate them to run for an office where they can be a spoiler or be perceived as a spoiler.

I recognize the reality that under the system we have, the Democrats and Republicans are the only viable political parties. I think if I were going to leave alternative party politics, the time to have done it would have been 1996 on election night. I should have said, "I'm done with this." I actually liked Penfield Tate, who was my Democratic opponent in 1996. I called him to congratulate him before the polls were closed. I said, "I know what the demographics are, you're going to win, congratulations." And he and I were on friendly terms. I enjoyed going to campaign events with him. I supported him when he ran for mayor of Denver. He invited me to visit him in the state legislature, invited me to sit in his seat on the floor of the House, which is nice.

When I ran in 1996, I had some vague notion that I was trying to run to win, but I still realized how much the system was stacked against alternative party candidates. Since then, I've very openly run as a protest candidate without the expectation that I could win.

I think people have an unrealistic expectation of what their results will be as an alternative party candidate. Running as alternative party candidate does give people an opportunity to participate in the system and get some experience. Some people start with an alternative party and then move to the Democrats or Republicans when they realize they just can't win, they can't get very far as an alternative party candidate. And that's a product of the system we have in the United States.

We have Green Party candidates in at least 30 national legislatures around the world, and that's because they use proportional representation. With our single-member district, winner-take-all voting system, we're tilting at windmills as alternative party candidates. I think once people realize that, they either leave and join a major party or they campaign for fundamental election reform.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have the idea that just changing the system to a different winner-take-all voting methods in single member districts will change it and open the process for alternative parties. But you need proportional representation so that everyone has fair representation. That's how most of the modern world does it.

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