New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner has been Secretary of State for 42 years. Throughout that long tenure, he has acted to erect ballot access barriers and do what he could to keep minor parties off the ballot. He has enormous influence over the New Hampshire legislature. There have been dozens of bills over the past few decades to improve New Hampshire ballot access, and he always testifies against such bills, or else sends his chief deputy to testify against them. And those bills are always defeated.
Since he has been Secretary of State, the independent petition requirement for statewide office has risen from 1,000 to 3,000. The number of votes for a party to remain on the ballot has increased from 3% to 4%. The time for collecting signatures on the new party petition has shrunk from unlimited time, to seven months. Gardner influenced the legislature to pass a bill that forced minor party and independent candidates to file a declaration of candidacy several months before their petitions were due, thus cutting the ability of a new party to have a free choice of nominees after submitting the petition.
Under his administration, New Hampshire remains one of the very few states to forcibly deprive a party of all its registered members when it goes off the ballot. The only other states that do that are Florida, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.
According to this NPR story, Colin Van Ostern is launching a campaign to replace Gardner. In New Hampshire and Maine, but no other states, the legislature chooses the Secretary of State, so Van Ostern must campaign for the Secretary of State job by influencing legislators. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
Florida eliminates party registrations when the party no longer exists as a cognizable organized entity. If the state is going to maintain records of partisan registration of voters, this makes much more sense than California’s practice of requiring voters to write a name in and then trying to figure out what was meant by “Independent”.
Your post may give the impression that 44 other states maintain records of party registrations. It also may give the impression that the Secretary of State is popularly elected in the other 44 States (or that elections are under the auspices of the Secretary of State).
How many zillion classes of election law stuff in the BAN database ???
Tens, hundreds, thousands ??? [Hope NOT even more]
ME-NH regimes — major ROT —
Having the gerrymander hacks appoint the hack chief state election officer.
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Nonpartisan AppV for ALL major elected executive officers – including ALL SOS.
I wonder who James Ogle is going to nominate to be Secretary of State of the Internet.
I was working in IT in a New Hampshire town when the letter came from the Secretary of State’s office telling us to eliminate “Libertarian” party designations in our voter records. I did it with a heavy heart, since I was registered Libertarian myself. I thought it was interesting that the letter from the Secretary of State’s office did not have Bill Gardner’s signature.
@John Sauter . . . interesting indeed that the letter wasn’t signed by the officeholder. Was the order a ministerial act, one required by the law, or was there some discretion left to the SOS?
Here in Michigan, the situation is somewhat the reverse. I’m upset by the excessive name-based publicizing of the Secretary of State’s office — and the DMV-type offices around the state, etc., etc. Legislators do it too, of course. . . .