Ballot Access News

See this this story about the legal status of Americans Elect in Maine. Soon, the Maine Secretary of State will be notifying all Americans Elect registrants that their party did not retain its spot on the ballot. These voters will be given a chance to re-register, but those who don’t respond will automatically be converted to independent voters. Americans Elect only had 58 registered members as of November 2012.

In Maine, a qualified party goes off the ballot if a general election is held and fewer than 10,000 registered members of the party vote. Because Americans Elect had so few registrants, it was literally impossible for it to retain its spot on the ballot. In effect, Maine requires a party to have approximately 13,000 to 15,000 registrants to remain on the ballot. If a party did have that many registrants, it is extremely likely that 10,000 of them would turn out to vote in a presidential or a gubernatorial election, so a party can remain ballot-qualified in Maine indefinitely even if it never runs any candidates.

Meanwhile, Eliot Cutler, who was on the board of Americans Elect, has hinted that he will again be an independent candidate for Governor of Maine. See this story about the 2014 gubernatorial election.

On January 30, a small claims court in Los Angeles County heard arguments in the case called Patel v Associated Students. Graduate student Ankur Patel is compelled to be a member of the student body association at Cal State Northridge. Patel is suing for a return of his dues because the student association sponsored a debate in May 2012 for four candidates running for Congress in the 30th district. There were seven candidates on the June 2012 ballot for that seat. The Association refused to invite all seven candidates, on the grounds that it only wanted to hear from the four candidates it believed had a realistic chance of placing first or second.

Patel is a member of the Green Party, and one of the excluded candidates was Mike Powelson, the only Green Party member running.

The judge seemed interested in the case, and extended the normal time for a hearing of this nature. Finally he said he wants more time to think about the case, and set a new hearing for March 26.

On January 30, a group of California Libertarian Party activists spent the day in the State Capitol in Sacramento, urging the defeat of AB 141. The group, organized by Beau Cain, was able to meet with legislative staffers for six California Assemblymembers.

AB 141 would decrease voter choice in November for Congress and state legislative races. Current law requires that the top-two vote-getters be placed on the November ballot. AB 141 would shrink that down to just one candidate, in the races in which only one candidate files in the primary but one or multiple write-in candidates file in June for the same office. AB 141 would prevent any of the write-in candidates from being placed on the November ballot, even if they did come in second, unless they got approximately 3,000 to 4,000 write-ins (if running for U.S. House or State Senate), or approximately 1,500 to 2,000 (if running for Assembly).