Democratic presidential candidate Larry Lessig has announced that he is dropping out of the race, accusing the Democratic party of having changed the rules for inclusion in the debates in a way that made it impossible for him to get in.
“Last week, we learned that the Democratic party has changed its rules for inclusion in the debate,” Lessig said on Monday in web video announcing the news. “And under the new rule, unless we can time travel, there is no way that I will qualify.
“It is now clear that the party won’t let me be a candidate.”
Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University, centered his candidacy on a call forcomprehensive campaign finance reform. None of the legislative priorities of the Democratic party were possible, he contended, unless and until corrupt money was removed from politics.
In announcing his withdrawal, Lessig paid tribute to Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old Internet activist who killed himself in 2013 after federal authorities charged him with 13 felonies for hacking into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network and downloading more than 4m academic articles from the JStor database.
“It was almost a decade ago that my friend Aaron Swartz convinced me to give up my work on internet policy and to take up the fight to fix the failed institution at the core of our democracy – Congress,” Lessig said in the video.
Lessig wrote after Swartz died that MIT could not claim “neutrality” in his death.
Lessig accused the Democratic party of blocking discussion of his banner issue.
“From the start, it was clear that getting into the Democratic debates was the essential step in this campaign,” he said. “I may be known in tiny corners of the tubes of the internets, but I am not well known to the American public generally. Our only chance to make this issue central to the 2016 presidential election was to be in those debates.”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A DNC official close to the process told the Guardian in an interview last month that the decision of what candidates to include in the next Democratic presidential debate, on 14 November, would be made by CBS News, the host network.
In his video, Lessig says the party changed the debate inclusion rules. “Until this week, the rule was three polls finding me at 1% in the six weeks prior to the debate. Last week we began to get close. Two polls found me at 1%. One more and I would be in the next debate, under the original rule.
“But under the new rule, the standard is three polls at least six weeks before the debate. That means I would have had to have qualified at the beginning of October, which means that nothing that happens now could matter.
“Under this new rule, I am just shut out.”
Lessig concluded with a tribute to Swartz.
“What he got me to see then, we must find a way to get all of America to see now – that we can’t solve any of the problems that this nation must address until we fix the crippled and corrupted institution of Congress first.”
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