The Maine Joint Committee on State and Local Government holds a hearing on May 4 at 9 a.m. One of the bills, LD 1041, would change the method by which a party remains ballot-qualified. Present law says it must have polled 5% for the office at the top of the ticket at either of the last two elections. The Green Party remains on the ballot by polling 5% for Governor in every mid-term year.
The bill would delete the vote test, and instead provide that a party remains on the ballot if it had at least 10,000 registered members who voted in the last general election.
The Green Party did not ask for this change, but would probably continue to remain on the ballot, since it had over 27,000 registered members as of October 2008. It seems very likely that at least 10,000 of them voted in November 2008.
This article claims the figure is 31,000 registered Greens in Maine.
http://www.wmtw.com/news/19357813/detail.html
This is a direct link to same article
Aren’t there some states that have both provisions; that is, a party can have a certain number of registrants OR it could garner a certain percentage of votes?
Yes, states that keep a party on the ballot if it meets either a registration test, or a vote test, are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Oregon. However, California has two registration tests, a big one that is just an alternative to the vote test, and a little one that is always mandatory regardless of the vote test (the little test is only one-fifteenth of 1%).