Huffman: Fighting for Fair and Free Elections

By Joshua Huffman

Hello, readers of Bearing Drift!

My name is Joshua Huffman and this year I am running for the Virginia Senate in District 2 which is located in the central Shenandoah Valley. If my name sounds familiar, some of you may remember me as the author of a blog called The Virginia Conservative that ran from 2008-2020.

In this article, I’d like to share why I’m running for office this year.

In 2014, I ran for a seat on the Harrisonburg City Council. Running as an independent, I discovered that I needed to collect the signatures of 125 registered voters in Harrisonburg in order to make the ballot.  However, I discovered that both my Republican and Democratic opponents didn’t need to collect signatures in order to have their names listed.

This struck me as decidedly unfair; why should Virginia have barriers to keep candidates other than Democrats and Republicans from running?

I decided to reach out to my state senator, Mark Obenshain, for help. After all, he billed himself as a pro-liberty, pro-limited government legislator and I thought I had a good rapport with him as I had been a volunteer for many of his campaigns.

Surprisingly, his legislative assistant refused to schedule a meeting.  He declared it to be a waste of the senator’s time.  I tried again several times but was rebuffed each and every time.

Can you imagine that? A representative refusing to meet with his constituents? Almost a year later, after the 2014 elections, Senator Obenshain hired a new legislative assistant and so I decided to try to speak to my senator again.

This time I was successful.  I started to explain why we needed fair and equal electoral laws in Virginia, but in response, Mark Obenshain told me that only Republicans and Democrats should be allowed to run for office in the state of Virginia. As someone who just spent nine months running as an independent, his words upset me greatly.

Free and fair elections are necessary for any democratic country and yet here was my state senator declaring that he opposed them.

Several years later, I enrolled at West Virginia University to earn a graduate degree in political science. My main research focus was on electoral laws and elections. And do you know what I found? Just about every country outside of the United States not only has a wider variety of candidates on the ballot each election, but they also have considerably more diversity in their legislatures.

Whether presidential or parliamentary, unitary or federal, elections that are first-past-the-post or proportional representation, electoral competition is much more robust throughout the world.

A big reason for this difference is ballot access laws. For example, if a new political party wants to contest the upcoming elections in the United Kingdom, they would need to fill out the necessary paperwork (which is similar in Virginia), and then by paying about $188, that party would be able to run candidates for every parliamentary seat in England, all 533 of them.

By comparison, if a new political party wishes to contest all 140 seats in the General Assembly this year, they would need to collect the signatures of at least 22,500 registered voters in the Commonwealth!  Paying $188 to gain ballot access for a new organization is reasonable, gathering 22,500 signatures from every corner of Virginia is not.

Merely comparing Virginia to the UK in terms of outcomes, we find that there are currently 12 political parties and 15 independents represented in the UK House of Commons, while there are only two parties and zero independents in the Virginia General Assembly. Which elected body do you think better represents the diverse opinions of the people? Are you sick of having to pick between the lesser of two evils every election cycle?

Politicians like Mark Obenshain are to blame.

On my campaign website I call Senator Obenshain an “enemy of democracy” because, by his own admission, that is what he is. Could you imagine looking for a place of worship and being allowed only two options? Or going to buy a new car to discover that the state mandates that there can be only two dealerships? That sounds more like Soviet Russia than the United States.

We should be outraged when politicians such as Mark Obenshain defend a system that squelches competition and guarantees a monopoly for the two largest political parties. Furthermore, Mark Obenshain isn’t burdened by political principles as his primary goal seems to be to elect more Republicans. It doesn’t seem to matter to him whether we elect conservatives or liberals, those who fight for liberty, or those who seek to increase the power of the state. He calls all Republicans “conservatives” whether they actually are or are not. So long as we “vote red,” Obenshain isn’t particularly concerned about promoting any particular ideology.

You may ask why I’m running against Obenshain now and not earlier.

Although I wanted to run against Obenshain in the last election, a job and educational opportunity at LSU prevented me from doing so. This year I am running to promote not only free and fair elections which are vital to any healthy and functioning democratic country but, on a larger banner of limited government and liberty for all, values that Obenshain may pretend to believe in, but doesn’t.

Whether it is for elections, businesses, religion, or anything else, the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers, subsidizing one, or enacting hurdles to keep others out. In all areas of life, competition creates better outcomes whether it is cheaper prices, higher quality goods, or a more responsive government.

Equality of opportunity is an ideal worth promoting. We need representatives with the courage to stand up for the people of the Shenandoah Valley; we must stop sending career politicians who surrender to the wishes of party bosses in Richmond.

If you’d like to learn more about me and my campaign or wish to donate or volunteer, you can find this information at my website PrinciplesBeforeParty.com.

To quote Mark Obenshain’s father, who was the 1978 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, “The most important goal in my life is to have some significant impact in preserving and expanding the realm of personal freedom in the life of this country.”  With your help, together we can make Richard Obenshain’s vision a reality in Virginia.