Third Candidates is a documentary series on electoral reform that follows third party candidates and other activists during the 2016 election.

We tend to look at our election system as something that is set in stone. Not a complex, malleable web of rules we created over time (rife with unintended consequences). Our goal was to show and explain the complexity of our electoral system through the eyes of political outsiders, break it down into more tangible parts, and suggest areas for reform. Specific areas of reform we explore are debate access, ballot access, and ranked choice voting.

A 2017 Harvard Business School report cited debate access rules and ranked choice voting as two achievable reforms that would help turn around our electoral system.


Examples

The crowdfunding trailer frames the broad topics (prefunding audio equipment warning!!!).

The first act of our first episode uses extensive archival to tell the history of the presidential debates and their controversial 15% rule.

The first 3:15 of Episode 4 showcases a traditional sit down interview, some animation, then goes into a guerilla style sequence following Gary Johnson.

In Episode 5, I interviewed Jill Stein to get a retro of her campaign before jumping into the media scrum at her recount annoucement outside of Trump Tower.

In this Episode 3 segment I added animation over video to help visualize why Ranked Choice Voting is a strong reform solution for Maine.

After each episode, we did short follow up videos based on VICE's "Debriefs." The postscript of Episode 3 is good example of me in the host capacity.