Libertarians run in record numbers

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana Libertarians don't expect any sweeping victories on Election Day, but party leaders believe their organizing efforts are paying off as a record number of candidates seek office.\nThe state Libertarian Party fielded just five candidates in 1994. There are 160 on Tuesday's ballot.\nLibertarians are running in each of nine congressional districts and for all four statewide offices. Dozens of others are competing for positions in city, county or township governments.\nOrganizers say the 2002 campaign has helped secure Indiana's status among the Libertarian Party's top states.\n"We're close to the top of the heap," said Brad Klopfenstein, executive director of the Indiana Libertarian Party. "We certainly run more candidates than any other state our size."\nFor Libertarians, the election is less about winning key offices than about winning percentages of the overall vote.\nFor instance, if the Libertarian candidate for secretary of state, Rebecca Sink-Burris, receives two percent of the vote -- as Libertarians did in 1994 and 1998 -- the party will enjoy four more years of automatic ballot access in Indiana.\nIf she were to get 10 percent, the party would become part of the primary system.\nSink-Burris acknowledges that is unlikely, with five percent a more realistic goal for now, but only because the major parties have stacked the odds against third parties.\nHer top priority is to get a state constitutional amendment passed to take redistricting out of the hands of the General Assembly. The current system, she says, favors incumbents.\n"I think that's why you've seen the scandals with the Build Indiana Fund and why we have a deficit when only two years ago we had a $2 billion surplus," said Sink-Burris, a former teacher who lives near Hindustan in south-central Indiana.\nAfter the 2000 election, the party spent most of 2001 expanding its state network. In 18 months, Libertarians increased the number of counties with chapters from 10 to 36.\nAs a result, Libertarians are running in many counties that had never seen a Libertarian candidate, said Sam Goldstein, an Indianapolis insurance agent and candidate for state treasurer.\nParty leaders are accustomed to celebrating small political victories, largely because those are the only kind they have won.\nLibertarians hold nearly 500 elected or appointed offices nationwide, but most are at the local level -- city or town councils, park boards and school boards, airport districts and justices of the peace. There are no Libertarian state legislators, and no one has ever been elected to Congress on the party label.\n"Obviously, we have a ways to go before our candidates are going to be on equal footing," Klopfenstein said. "We're getting closer to getting equal treatment."\nRobert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, said Libertarians' main role has been to provide an alternative to Democrats and Republicans.\n"And increasingly people are saying that there are no new ideas coming from the major parties, so in that sense it becomes a force," Schmuhl said. "How great a force is the question."\nThe Libertarian Party had humble beginnings in a Colorado living room in 1971. Disenchantment of a few voters over the Vietnam War and President Nixon's wage-and-price controls has grown into what supporters say is the nation's best-organized and most successful third party. Libertarians founded a state party in Indiana in 1975.\nIndiana Libertarians enjoyed a brief moment in the national spotlight in July, when hundreds gathered in Indianapolis for the party's national convention, where they touted their candidates and principles of individual liberty, smaller government and free trade.\nDespite their growing numbers, most Libertarian candidates are easy to overlook. They do comparatively little campaigning, fund-raising and almost no major advertising.\nUntil candidates become more aggressive, Schmuhl said, Libertarians risk remaining virtual unknowns.\n"Stealth candidates don't help a cause," Schmuhl said. "If the party is serious about having greater influence, then it takes more active participation by the candidates themselves to get the message out"