In the opinion of Ballot Access News, a model state ballot access for minor parties would closely resemble the laws in place in Colorado, Delaware and Louisiana. Ballot-qualified status for a minor party should be based on whether it has a reasonable number of registered voters. It should not be based on a party’s vote in the previous election. Colorado and Louisiana define a ballot-qualified minor party to be a group with 1,000 registered voters; Delaware defines it to be a group with registration of one-twentieth of 1% of the state total.
Of course, this model law cannot be applied in the 21 states that do not have registration by party.
The advantage of using registration data, instead of votes cast at a previous election, are: (1) registration data is current, whereas votes in a previous election are not. Sometimes parties that pass the vote test in a previous election cease to exist. California recognized the Natural Law Party in 2004 and 2006, because it had polled 2% in 2002. But the party had ceased to exist in 2004 and 2006, and California wasted money printing up Natural Law Party ballots when no one ran in that party’s primary in either year.
(2) Using a voter registration test, instead of a vote test, gives minor parties the option to skip the statewide races, if they wish, and just concentrate on offices that are easier to win, such as state legislative seats and partisan county and city offices. But when a statewide vote test is used, minor parties are forced to compete in statewide contests even if they may not wish to.
(3) Voter registration tests do not cost much money to administer. By contrast, petitions, as a method to qualify new parties, do force elections officials to waste public money on the petition-checking process. Petition-checking generally costs 10 cents per signature. And if elections officials use the challenge system, and don’t check petitions unless a private group challenges the petition, the results are often unjust. Petitioning parties are least likely to be challenged if those parties have so little appeal that they don’t threaten either major party, and most likely to be challenged if they have real voter support.
(4) Petitioning is inherently flawed. There are always illegible signatures. There are always signatures from people who have moved and re-registered so recently that the voter registration records are not up to date. Disputes about the number of valid signatures are costly to resolve.
Richard Winger, you are a secular saint, and your thesis [idea] is well organized and either the biggest load of steer manure ever produced by an agricultural college or just this side of semi brilliant. Thank you for being a bright spot in a long long dim dank dark spell!
Oops, on GOOD things about petitioning is that it is one way to build party membership, including new, less burnt out, activists.
Well, you can build party membership through registration drives as well. In my experience with the Greens in Washington state, you don’t get alot of response from people who sign to get your candidates on the ballot in terms of joining or fundraising, because a majority of them sign out of a sense of basic fairness to expand the choices on the ballot rather than to join a party or support a candidate.
I’m clearly a partisan Green, but I would sign to get any third party candidate on the ballot for any office, because I believe a wide range of choices can only make an election better, even if I don’t agree with some of those choices.
I think Richard’s plan, as the CO, DE and LA systems are clearly the best. My only fear is that it wouldn’t go over well in my state.
Washington is ADAMANTLY anti-party registration since we abolished it over 70 years ago through an initiative campaign. And since there have been some court battles in my state over dueling primary systems (one bad, the other worse), I can only see the way to Richard’s plan coming from a court demanding we start registering by party.