Ballot Access News -- Breaking News 2000

Updates to the monthly newsletters -- special to this website.
Note: these are written or co-written by Richard Winger and/or Bob Bickford.

August 29, 2000

• The South Dakota independent petition deadline of June 20 was held unconstitutional. However, the judge didn't put Nader on the ballot, since even counting all the signatures he collected after the deadline, he still didn't have enough valid. --RW

August 30, 2000

• The Oklahoma independent petition deadline of July 15 was held valid, so Nader won't be on the ballot there either. The judge also pooh-poohed Nader's claims that his petitioners were harrassed by law enforcement personnel. --RW
• The federal lawsuit filed by Buchanan's wing of the Reform Party, against John Hagelin, was thrown out of court for jurisdictional reasons. --RW

August 31, 2000

• Al Gore, Harry Browne, Pat Buchanan, and Howard Philips have already accepted invitations to an inclusive Presidential candidate debate, to be held October 20th. The Bush campaign has twice said they are "seriously considering" participating in such a debate. The subject will be "How To Restore Ethics To Government?" and the debate is being organized by the organization "Judicial Watch". Surprisingly, there's been no word from Ralph Nader yet -- please urge him to participate! --BB
• State courts in California and Montana have ruled that Buchanan, not Hagelin, is the Reform Party nominee. --RW

September 21, 2000

• The Harry Browne campaign announces the conclusion to their efforts to get on the ballot in Arizona with these two paragraphs:

  On the road to La Crosse I hear by cell phone that the Arizona Supreme Court has rejected our plea to have me listed on the Arizona ballot as an independent candidate. The "official" Arizona Libertarian Party is not the organization affiliated with the national Libertarian Party, and it decided to put L. Neil Smith's name on the ballot as the Libertarian candidate for President. We filed petitions containing more than enough names to qualify as an independent candidate, but the signatures had to be filed before I was the LP's nominee. We applied for an extension, a procedure that almost all court precedents have upheld -- but the judge hearing the case misread the precedents and the state Supreme Court refused to hear our appeal.

  It's unfortunate that some Libertarians are more concerned with proving they're superior to other Libertarians than they are with bringing about a Libertarian America. But this sort of posturing and back-biting happens in almost any large organization, and we should not expect to be exempt from the norms of human nature.

  Ballot Access News will show the Libertarian Party as being on all ballots, but Harry Browne as only on 49 states plus DC. --BB

September 29, 2000

• In an opinion article by Tonie Nathan (formerly on the web at http://search.tribnet.com/archive/30_day_archive/0928b91.htmlbut apparently since removed; a local copy is available), the issue of a lack of United States compliance with an international treaty (to which the USA is a signatory) regarding political parties is raised. Similar issues with the same treaty were previously covered in Ballot Access News in various past issues; for example, see the October 12, 1996 issue, the December 12, 1996 issue, the January 12, 1997 issue, and the May 5, 1997 issue (in the latter, near the end of the headline story, under the words "Silver Lining?"). --BB

November 4, 2000

• A table summarizing 2000 Presidential Ballot Status is available. --BB
• A good article on the effects of ballot access and taxpayer funding of elections is No Greens for Me by Jacob T. Levy of the University of Chicago. He only uses a couple of paragraphs for partisan comments (he likes Browne); the remainder is some extremely worthwhile reading about the likely effects of federal funding should the Greens get 5% in this election. --BB

November 6, 2000

• Fox News has pledged to include third-party candidate votes in their regular election-night coverage; in particular, votes for Nader and Browne (and others, presumably) will be shown right alongside votes for Bush and Gore. ABC News is sticking to their policy of only reporting such votes where they exceed the margin between the two major-party candidates; no word as yet on how they will handle races where only one major-party candidate is running -- or what they will do if a third-party candidate wins. --BB

November 8, 2000

• Fox News broke their promise, and did not show any third-party votes (other than occasional reports of Nader and Buchanan totals) in any of their broadcasts. CNN included Nader and Buchanan and Hagelin percentages but not votes (Hagelin always showed 0%) in the rotating state-by-state results at the bottom of the screen. This was uniform -- even in states where Hagelin was not on the ballot! At no time did they ever show Browne or Phillips, even in states where Browne was ahead of Buchanan. Other networks generally reported only Nader, or only Nader and Buchanan, if they reported any third-party votes at all (they usually didn't).

  On the web, only the Yahoo! News site presented the complete results from the Associated Press, both totals and state-by-state, with correct Party names. CNN's website was completely incompetent with regard to Party names, showing Browne and other candidates as "I" (for independent) everywhere -- this despite the fact that they clearly had sample ballots from all 50 states (some were shown during the television coverage) and must certainly have people on staff capable of reading same. The FoxNews site was damaged in some way early in the evening and had no working links. All three of CNN, ABC and CBS reported nationwide totals only for Nader and Buchanan, forcing those interested in other candidates to follow fifty state links on their respective sites to obtain the numbers. The MSNBC site was the worst, totally omitting the names, party names, or votes for Browne, Phillips, Hagelin, or any candidates other than Gore, Bush, Nader, and Buchanan in all of their state-by-state results.

  At this writing, the margin between Bush and Gore is 128,905 votes -- Nader, Buchanan, and Browne all exceeded this number by significant amounts (Nader by a factor of over twenty to one!). --BB

• The Libertarian Party in the state of Washington appears to have met the qualification for "major party" status in that state, by achieving more than five percent of the vote in a statewide race in an even-numbered year. Preliminary results show them with 7.55% in the Lt. Governor race, 5.23% in the State Auditor race, and 5.19% in the Commissioner of Public Lands race. --BB

November 12, 2000

• Green Party candidates have been elected or re-elected in 16 races around the country. The Libertarian Party reports 22 new office-holders, and in addition one Democratic candidate was elected to the New Hampshire state house on the Libertarian ballot line. So far, no reports of any other parties winning elections. --BB

• Libertarian Party candidates for U.S. House won a combined 1.66 million votes -- the largest cumulative vote total ever won by third-party Congressional candidates. "There has never been a minor party -- or any party other than the Republicans and Democrats -- that ever got even a million votes for U.S. House," said Richard Winger, publisher of Ballot Access News. "I think it's stunning." --BB

November 22, 2000

• Updated numbers show the Libertarian Party has elected 31 persons (this represents approximately a ten percent increase in their number of persons in office nationally), and their presidential candidate Harry Browne received over 382 thousand votes. Plus, this note from a Party press release:
  

  "According to our figures, LP candidates won at least 3,362,829 unique votes -- whether they were cast for [Harry] Browne, a U.S. House candidate, or another state-level candidate," said LP National Director Steve Dasbach. "We got that number by adding up the highest vote total partisan Libertarian candidates received in every non-overlapping geographic area around the USA."

  This is an impressive total for any third party. --BB

November 27, 2000

• The total of elected or re-elected Green candidates has climbed to 20 persons, according to information from the Party. --BB