Letter to the Editor

I was astonished, stunned actually, to see that your "voter guide" for the 2014 election neglected to mention all the candidates for the US Senate seat.

North Carolina has very restrictive ballot access laws. The Libertarian Party has been ballot-qualified since the 1980s, and has consistently run candidates for state-wide offices. No other party has consistently been ballot-qualified. The state has rules to decide who "counts" as a candidate. For The Chronicle to impose its own Procrustean biases is appalling.

It's up to the voters to decide what to do. That is the nature of a "Voter Guide," I would think, to present the choices and let voters make up their own minds. But you simply excluded, without explanation or even a footnote, candidate Sean Haugh.

You imposed prior restraint, a heinous act for a newspaper. You can endorse candidates on your editorial page, but you can't suppress alternatives in your Voter Guide because they happen to fail your ideological litmus test.

It was not always thus. In 2008, The Chronicle included a full and fair description of the candidates, as they did in 2012. The Chronicle has in the past acted as an actual newspaper, rather than a gatekeeper of "allowable" political truths.

I hope The Chronicle will not continue to suppress legitimate, ballot qualified alternatives just because you scorn their views. That's not your call.

Sincerely,

Michael Munger