"The Second Bill of Rights": How 100+ Years of Third-Party Surges Keep Electing the Other Guy
The Structural Fixes Coming in SBOR Articles the First & Second
How much do you know about “The Second Bill of Rights” already? Nothing? Come on now, friends and countrymen . . . it’s been public knowledge for a whopping three whole days now! Ha!
Learn more about “The Second Bill of Rights” here on my Substack channel and on the SBOR website! Play the SBOR Parlor Game even!
Déjà Vu 2025 — Musk’s “America Party” Launch
On July 5, 2025, Elon Musk told Reuters he had “formed the America Party” and would explore a presidential bid after Senate Republicans muscled through a $3.3 trillion tax-and-spend bill he detests. reuters.com Chinese social media lit up, U.S. polls again showed nearly two-thirds of voters “want a new option,” and pundits rushed to rank Musk beside Theodore Roosevelt, George Wallace, John Anderson, and Ross Perot. History, however, says outsized talent and money cannot overcome two structural locks: ballot-access barriers engineered by the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans; and a House of Representatives frozen at 435 seats since 1929. Together they all but guarantee that a strong third-party run hands the White House to the opposite major party.
Spoiler Math 101
The United States elects presidents by winner-take-all plurality in 48 states, plus single-member, first-past-the-post congressional districts everywhere else. In 1954, political scientist Maurice Duverger predicted exactly this outcome: two entrenched parties, with insurgents shunted to “spoiler” status when they dare split the vote. The six modern cases below prove his law in practice.
1912 — Teddy Roosevelt & the Bull Moose Party Foists Woodrow Wilson Upon Our Republic
Progressive ex-president Theodore Roosevelt won 27.4 percent, incumbent Republican William Taft managed 23.2 percent, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson walked off with the presidency at just 41.8 percent of the popular vote. Ballot-access rules were still lax, so the sole barrier was plurality arithmetic: split the GOP, elect the Democrat. Roosevelt’s charismatic run thus inaugurated the “vote-the-other-guy-in” pattern, and Wilson saddled us with the Sixteenth Amendment, the Seventeenth Amendment, and the Federal Reserve his first year in office.
1968 — Wallace’s Dixie Revolt Lifts Nixon
George Wallace’s American Independent Party stormed the Deep South, winning 45 electoral votes and 13.5 percent nationwide in 1968. His campaign also triggered the first modern ballot-access lawsuit, Williams v. Rhodes (1968), after Ohio demanded signatures equal to 15 percent of the prior gubernatorial turnout — effectively disqualifying newcomers. The Supreme Court struck the rule, calling it “invidiously discriminatory,” yet most states responded by raising their ballot access thresholds. Wallace siphoned culturally conservative Democrats; the beneficiary was Republican Richard Nixon, who beat Hubert Humphrey by barely 0.7 percent in the popular vote.
1980 — John Anderson’s Centrist Exit Seals Reagan’s Pluralities
Just 45 years ago, Liberal Republican congressman John Anderson bolted his party, captured 6.6 percent of the vote, and turned 24 states into plurality wins instead of majorities. Most analyses of county returns show Anderson drew two-to-one from Carter-leaning moderates, widening Ronald Reagan’s margin and transforming a close three-way popular vote (50.7–41.0–6.6) into an Electoral-College landslide.
1992 & 1996 — Perot Proves Money Can’t Buy a Third Party (But What Could Have Been . . . )
In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot financed the only 50-state independent drive since 1912, marshaling more than a million volunteer signatures. He won 18.9 percent of the vote in 1992 (including mine up in ruby red Nevada County, California!), helping Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush with just 43 percent. Exit polls split on exactly whose votes Perot diverted, but even FiveThirtyEight’s retrospective concedes that “Bush would likely have fared better without him.” fivethirtyeight.com Terrified duopoly legislators retaliated: most of today’s “sore-loser” laws — banning a primary loser from re-filing as independent — were enacted between 1970 and 1995, pinching off any repeat of Perot’s populist bypass. ballotpedia.org Shut out of presidential debates in 1996, Perot sagged to 8 percent.
2025 — Musk Meets the Highest Wall Yet
New York now demands 45,000 signatures plus 500 from at least 13 of its 26 congressional districts — all due 23 weeks before Election Day. ballotpedia.org Forty-six states overlay additional quirks: crippling filing fees, witness rules, or party-controlled certification. Even a centibillionaire must hire or mobilize tens of thousands of circulators and attorneys before convincing the first voter. Meanwhile, every signature Musk collects in a battleground could tip control of Congress — giving Democrats a perverse incentive to encourage his run if it peels votes from Republicans, and vice-versa.
The Two Structural Locks
Ballot-Access Escalation. After 1912, states replaced locally printed ballots with state-issued ones and began imposing signature quotas far higher for new parties than for the Democratic and Republican nominees who receive automatic spots. Ohio’s 15 percent rule struck down in Williams v. Rhodes was extreme, but today’s median requirement for an independent presidential slate is still 85,000 signatures, often on prohibitively early deadlines. Sore-loser laws complete the trap by blocking disappointed primary challengers from re-filing as independents in 47 states.
The Frozen House. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 fixed the House at 435 seats—an idea that Madison would have been shocked at. And, despite a tripling of population since then, we still have the same number of representatives. Fewer districts mean steeper statewide signature quotas, fewer local rungs for nascent parties, and a sky-high electoral threshold for winning even one seat. The duopoly loves the scarcity: it raises the cost of entry while rewarding national campaigns that act only as spoilers at the presidential level.
Why the “Opposite-Party” Spoiler Pattern Endures
Duverger’s logic says minor-party votes rarely translate into seats; they merely rearrange pluralities between the two majors. When ballot access is onerous and district magnitude is fixed at one, disgruntled voters face a cruel choice: “waste” a vote on principle or hold their nose for the lesser evil. Every surge of protest — Roosevelt, Wallace, Anderson, Perot, Musk — therefore ends by electing the side least preferred by that protest’s base.
“The Second Bill of Rights” Article the First — Re-Opening the Ballot
Article the First of The Second Bill of Rights (SBOR) restores federal elections to what the Framers assumed: any serious citizen can run. It caps petition burdens at 0.5 percent of prior voters and filing fees at $500, bars parties from policing their rivals, and builds a 14-day fast-track into federal courts for any access dispute. Had that rule been in force, Perot’s 1992 volunteers could have redirected millions of petition dollars toward persuasion — or Musk could spend on ideas instead of 50 sets of lawyers. Most importantly, when access costs fall, spoiler panic subsides; states can safely adopt ranked-choice or runoff rules knowing that ballots won’t be a telephone book of vanity campaigns.
“The Second Bill of Rights” Article the Second — Unfreezing the House
SBOR’s Article the Second repeals the 1929 cap and institutes Madison’s originally proposed maximum ratio of roughly 1 Representative per 30,000 voting-eligible citizens, swelling the House into a 10,000-plus-member REAL “People’s Chamber.” You or one of your actual neighbors will be your representative again — not some stranger that you have no real way to petition to without the Secret Service, FBI or Homeland Security adding you to yet another list. Smaller districts slash ballot-access math (fewer signatures per seat), give new parties winnable footholds, and weaken presidential spoiler risk by letting insurgents prove viability locally first. Term limits, residency rules, and non-gerrymandered maps baked into Article the Second keep that larger House accountable.
(Article the Fourth adds in yet more flavor, but I’m going to save that nugget for another day. Sign-up on the SBOR website and you will get first looks into parts of the SBOR itself over the next year: SBOR: Join the Cause.)
Objections & Rebuttals
“Ballot clutter will overwhelm voters.” — Empirically, jurisdictions with easier access but runoff or ranked-choice voting (e.g., Maine, Alaska) report modest ballots and higher satisfaction.
“A 10,000-member House is unworkable.” — Congress already manages 10,000 + staffers; digital committees and secure remote votes let lawmakers scale like open-source developers.
“Ranked-choice alone solves spoilers.” — Not if candidates can’t get on the ballot. Article the First supplies the on-ramp; Article the Second lowers the grade.
Maybe even YOU will run for office after ratification!
Closing — Fix the Launchpad, Not the Rocket
Elon Musk can land boosters on barges, but even he can’t launch a third party from a pad fenced in 50 different ways. Roosevelt, Wallace, Anderson, and Perot were all told the same lie: raise more money, hire smarter consultants, and you can beat the system. They raised it. They hired them. And each time the system beat them — electing the rival they most opposed. We also just saw what the unelected administrative and bureaucratic state did to him and DOGE.
Until we ratify Articles the First and Second, America’s third-party fever will remain the surest path to electing the “other guy,” and voters will keep waking up from the dream to the same two-party duopoly.
Crisis and conflict are coming to our Republic. It’s getting closer and more inevitable with every passing week, month, and year. We will be prepared to act when the moment arrives to restore our Constitution to its original Madisonian intent.
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Do not sit by and watch this opportunity to restore our country to even greater greatness pass by.