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Reason TV Twelve-Minute Interview with Me on Ballot Access — 8 Comments

  1. As you may know, when the New York legislature first legislated for the Australian ballot, the governor vetoed the bill, saying that it would eliminate the right of self-nomination, which he meant the right to vote for whomever you wanted – even if they weren’t a candidate. The counter argument was that it would so easy to qualify for the ballot it didn’t matter (I think it was perhaps 100 signature). In South Australia where the “Australian” ballot originated, only two signatures were needed, that of the nominator and the seconder.

    The corruption of the Australian ballot in the United States is due to the long ballot where a plethora of offices are elected on the same ballot. This led previously to parties distributing ballots. If you only elected a federal representative in November, there really would be no need for a party to print ballots. But in the US, the party ballots were incorporated into the Australian ballot. This then resulted in legislators from more successful parties increasing barriers to independents and minor parties.

    The only practical way to eliminate this is to have _all_ candidates appear on a single ballot, and make ballot access candidate-based. If ballot access is candidate-based as it is in Louisiana, California, and Washington, it is fairly easy to qualify for the ballot.

    If political parties want to campaign for groups of candidates, they would be free to distribute lists of suggested candidates, which is what technically the party ballots were before Australian ballots. When there were party ballots, newspapers also printed ballots, and many newspapers were more overtly partisan.

    Another change would be to separate federal, state, and local elections.

  2. I just posted this on Facebook and told my friends that you’re so smart and fair. Congratulations, Richard.

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