mr hornberger points to the tip of the preverbal iceberg in this essay on why we don't really have real elections or even a real political system if you extrapolate; 

For many years now, the Republican and Democrat parties have enacted and enforced an array of rules and restrictions on the ability of third-party candidates to run for public office. The nature of the restrictions varies from state to state, but the most notable of them involves petitioning requirements. Third-party candidates are required to secure the signatures of a minimum number of registered voters on petitions as a condition for running for office. Most of the time, the people signing the petition are not even acquainted with the person who wishes to run for office. They just sign because they think, rightly, that anyone should be free to run for public office.

In some states, the signature requirement is somewhat easy to manage. In other states, however, it is virtually impossible to achieve owing to the large number of signatures needed to get onto the ballot. That’s when the third-party candidate must turn to professional signature-gatherers, but they usually charge an arm and a leg to secure the signatures. In fact, by the time third-party candidates pay the professional petition-gatherers, their campaign funds are oftentimes depleted, thereby hampering their ability to compete against the candidates of the two major parties.

As someone who has gathered signatures in the past, I can attest to the arduousness of this task. For one thing, it’s difficult to find locations where one can encounter large numbers of registered voters. Most private businesses do not want their customers being accosted by signature-gatherers and thus will not grant permission to gather signatures in front of their establishments. And then there is the demeaning task of asking people to sign a petition to support a candidate they have never heard of, a job that has obviously been made more difficult with Covid...........read more........