Earlier this month, Minnesota minor parties created an informal group to work together on ballot access problems, and last week the group met with Secretary of State Steve Simon. The meeting went well and it is likely that Secretary Simon will arrange to have ballot access improvement bills introduced in the 2016 legislature. Minnesota has historically been hospitable to minor parties, and yet ironically Minnesota is one the twelve or thirteen states that has no ballot-qualified parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Other states with no statewide ballot-qualified parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties are Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington. Tennessee is ambiguous and a court will decide whether the Constitution and Green Parties are on the ballot.
You can have all the ballot access for third parties you want forever, but without pure proportional representation (PR), winning seats is not guaranteed and likely impossible because of the nature of plurality elections.
The 9th USA Parliament has been leading by example, using PR for twenty consecutive years and it works fine. Our priorities are in order and ballot access is a lower priority than ballot access for our team.
Those who use plurality elections attract egomaniac conceited power-grabbers, suffer from dictatorship, censorship and many other dysfunctions which render them practically useless, dysfunctional and disorganized.
The United Coalition of the USA and International Parliaments function very well and we’ve been steadily improving for twenty consecutive years despite the pluralists.
Nobody has it as good as OUR team. The team, the team, the TEAM.
http://www.usparliament.org
http://www.international-parliament.org
When Minneapolis had Top 2, there was no need for party qualification. You might recall that a Green Party candidate was elected to the city council under Top 2.
NO primaries, caucuses and conventions.
Ballot access ONLY via equal nominating petitions.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
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The robots in parties can have their own internal governing systems for clubby stuff.
Illinois might have no alternative parties that are considered established statewide, but the Green Party has been an established party in Congressional districts 5 and 12 since 2012. They haven’t managed to completely get rid of our ballot lines yet, and we’ll be sure to keep it that way in 2016. We might even get re-established statewide in 2018, as people get more and more fed up with the bi-partisan dysfunction in Springfield and start considering voting for someone else.