On May 11, independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman turned in 169,574 signatures to the Texas Secretary of State. It is somewhat amusing to see that the Texas Secretary of State has been fighting all attempts to force him to use random sampling. With 223,000 signatures from Carole Strayhorn turned in two days ago, that makes almost 400,000 signatures that need to be verified. Employees of the Secretary of State’s office must not only check to see if each signer is registered. Employees must also check to see if each signer voted in either the March primary, or the April run-off primary. Also the employees need to see if the signer signed both petitions. And if the Green Party manages to turn in enough signatures on May 30 to qualify, that will be tens of thousands of more signatures to verify.
Texas does not have the statewide initiative process, so Texas elections officials are not accustomed to verifying hundreds of thousands of signatures.
It is reported that the Sec of State has hired an outside company to create a database for the use of validating the signatures. Which might be good for these candidates since an outside vendor will probably do a better job based on reports I have from Harris County election officials who have stated that the SOS office has had an element of ineptitude when it came to voter registration rolls during elections and disputes in close elections.
It occurs to me that this is a setback for election reform in Texas. Friedman has turned in twice as many signatures as the Libertarian Party of Texas did in 2004 for their ballot access drive; Rylander, nearly three times as many. Supporters of greater ballot access restrictions will point to these drives as evidence that Texas’ petition requirements are not overly burdensome or restrictive.
In fact, I expect those restrictions to go up should Perry win re-election…
Well, keep in mind that the the effort of Friedman and Strayhorn to get as many signatures as they did were to a) make a statement regarding viability b) create a grassroots organzation, at least in Freidman’s case c)prevent invalid signatures from not allowing the candidate on the ballot, probably in Strayhorn’s case d) prevent shennanigans by the Republican Sec of State or lawsuit disputes by the Perry side. I don’t think there will be any legislative push for a different ballot requirement in the future.