The Socialist Workers Party got a FedEx letter from Tennessee Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins at its national campaign headquarters in New York Aug. 12 confirming that the SWP presidential ticket of Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter will be on the ballot in Tennessee this November.
The campaign filed 774 signatures from working people throughout Tennessee July 8, well over the requirement of 275. They also gathered the required 11 presidential electors.
Ernest Wells, from Knoxville, was one of the first to volunteer as an elector in May. Now 63 and disabled, Wells worked all his life. He first contacted the SWP campaign last spring after reading about it in the online Militant, wanting to know how he could help.
“It’s way past time to do away with the two-party system,” he said, after he read about the SWP candidates’ call for working people to break with the bosses’ two parties and form a party of labor. When campaign supporters visited him, Wells subscribed to the Militant and got two books, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class and The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark.
Rayshawn Reece, from Murfreesboro, was also excited to learn about the SWP campaign and its program, readily agreeing to serve as an elector. Working as an elevator maintenance apprentice, Reece also works as a car mechanic to get by. “I like what Rachele says about what working people face and what we can do,” Reece said recently. “What she is presenting is for the common man, people like me who are just trying to look out for themselves and their families.” He got a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power to learn more about the SWP and how workers can chart a course toward taking power from the capitalists responsible for the crisis working people face here and around the world.