Free & Equal, and Open the Debates, are hosting a presidential debate in Denver on Thursday, October 8. The debate will be live-streamed. The candidates will be in the same room with each other. In order to qualify, candidates must be on the ballot in at least ten states.

Rocky De La Fuente, Howie Hawkins, Gloria La Riva, and Brock Pierce have already confirmed. President Trump and Joe Biden are invited, but they are forbidden by their contracts with the Commission on Presidential Debates to participate in any debates other than the Commission debates. Don Blankenship, Jo Jorgensen, and Kanye West have not said yet whether they will attend.

On September 18, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

No member of the current court was more favorable to minor party and independent candidates and voters than she was. She wrote Buckley v American Constitutional Law Foundation, which struck down state laws requiring petitioners to be registered voters.

Also, in the last Supreme Court decision that discussed minor parties, Clingman v Beaver (2005), she joined the dissent of Justice John Paul Stevens which said, “There is over a century of experience demonstrating that the two major parties are fully capable of maintaining their own positions of dominance in the political marketplace without any special assistance from the state governments they dominate.”

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. House member Jamie Raskin, have this op-ed in the Boston Globe, advocating that Massachusetts voters pass the initiative to use ranked choice voting. Raskin is a Maryland Congressman. Maryland doesn’t have the statewide initiative process, but Massachusetts does.