On July 19, the North Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee passed H.88. The bill does some good but some harm. It does not change the number of signatures needed for a new party to get on the ballot. It does lower the number of votes needed for a party to remain on the ballot, from 10% of the vote for governor or president, to 2%. That is a significant improvement.

Unfortunately, the bill makes some things worse. It imposes filing fees on candidates nominated by convention (currently, new parties always nominate by convention, and their nominees need not pay a filing fee; the original intent of filing fees was to help pay for the administrative cost of primaries, so it didn’t make sense to impose fees on candidates nominated by convention).
Also, it seems to require a party to poll 2% for both president and governor (no state has ever had a requirement that a party must meet the vote test in more than one race).

H.88 also lowers the number of signatures needed for a statewide independent from the old unconstitutional requirement (2% of the number of registered voters) to 2% of the last gubernatorial vote cast. 2% of the last gubernatorial vote is currently 69,734 signatures.