July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.

All voices should be heard

Letters to the Editor

To the editor:
A recent Fort Wayne News-Sentinel editorial said that third party candidates shouldn’t be allowed to participate in public debates, citing Libertarian candidate Andy Horning specifically as an unnecessary “distraction” in the first Indiana U.S. Senate debate.
The editorial was wrong in saying “Libertarians usually earn 1 or 2 percent in Indiana races.”
 In 2011 Indiana Libertarians elected three candidates to local office. One, a town judge, was re-elected to her third term. In 2010, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Rebecca Sink-Burris, received 5.4 percent of the vote, while Libertarian Mike Wherry garnered 5.8 percent in that same year’s secretary of state race.
Another assertion, “It is generally conceded that Perot’s 19 percent took more votes from Bush than Clinton,” is again, wrong.
From the Washington Post’s summary of exit polling in the 1992 Presidential race: “Ross Perot’s presence on the 1992 presidential ballot did not change the outcome of the election, according to an analysis of the second choices of Perot supporters.
The analysis indicated that in Perot’s absence, only Ohio would have have shifted from the Clinton column to the Bush column.

This would still have left Clinton with a healthy 349-to-189 majority in the electoral college.
Probably the most absurd assertion made in the editorial is that only the philosophies of the two major parties should matter to voters. A recent Pew Research survey has the breakdown of registered voters as 40 percent Democrats, 35 percent Independents, and 25 percent Republican.
This last May a Global Strategy Group poll for the Donnelly campaign had 35 percent of those polled self-identifying as Independents.
Clearly, there are THREE political philosophies that should be presented.
The News-Sentinel’s editorial opinion is therefore misleading to the voter who seeks objective, truthful information on candidates and issues. Applying the News-Sentinel’s own logic that only the preeminent and biggest opinions are the only one’s worthy of consideration, it would in fact be in the best self-interest of discerning voters to limit their selection of editorials to those of the two largest newspapers in the state — the Indianapolis Star and Northwest Times.
Jerry Titus
Kokomo[[In-content Ad]]
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