The Los Angeles Times has this story, by its Sacramento correspondent George Skelton, that is a model of fairness and clarity compared to earlier stories and editorials today in the Sacramento Bee and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. However, even this story fails to mention that Proposition 14 also makes it more difficult for ballot-qualified parties to remain qualified.
Once Proposition 14 in approved by voters, the whole areas of party-qualification should be reviewed.
Since Proposition 14 will not take effect until 2011, there will be absolutely no effect on ballot qualification until after the next gubernatorial election in 2014, under which some parties could conceivably lose ballot access for the 2016 Presidential election.
California should really rip out most of the Elections Code that tries to specify internal organization of each individual party. Are there any other States where the legislature has specified rules for specific parties to such an extent? California is one of those states where great effort has been made to structure the statutes and make their language consistent (see Illinois or New York for a contrast). It must be an embarrassment then to have so much useless content.
Proposition 14 already starts this reform by explicitly recognizing the right of political parties to endorse candidates for not only voter-nominated offices, but for non-partisan offices as well. They may freely endorse candidates who prefer another party, and have that endorsement be distributed on a sample ballot.
The election code merely needs to state minimal standards. For example, it should be clear which party officers have authority to represent the political party in interactions with the State; to name presidential elector candidates, presidential preference primary candidates, etc., and to ensure that the political party is responsive to the registered members.
The party elections should be completely separated from any State elections. Perhaps party elections should be moved to odd years. Parties could be given the option of using conventions or elections or a combination. If a party wants to use nominations, the State could simply send out a notice of the time and place to party registrants.
There is really no reason for the State to care too much about how few registrants a party that is not holding a primary has, the standard for a “state-recognized party” could be quite low, perhaps just a few 100 registrants.
Qualification for presidential elections and presidential preference primaries should be based on performance in the presidential election, and qualification for presidential candidates by petition should be greatly reduced. It is ridiculous to require 175,000 signatures for an independent presidential candidate, and 65 for an independent gubernatorial candidate. So let’s change it to 1/10 of 1% of the presidential vote, which is around 13,000 signature. Let a political party count any of its party registrants as part of the signature count for its nominee. If a party has 5,000 members, then it would have to gather 8,000 additional signatures. An independent candidate would have to gather the full 13,000.
4 of the 6 currently qualified political parties did not place the winner of their presidential preference primary on the November ballot, despite the language of 2004’s Proposition 60 that this would be the case. So why should the State bother funding these partisan exercises?
So instead of a partisan preferential primary, have an open preferential primary. Any candidate that meets the 13,000 vote standard goes on the November ballot. Let any recognized party be able to designate a candidate that qualifies as its candidate, with permission of the candidate of course. Let candidates who don’t have the support in the primary, augment it by petition signatures. This would include late starters who were not on the primary ballot. Let the political parties use or ignore the results of the preferential primary as they wish.
Post-proposition 14 ballot-qualified parties can have a donation envelope sent to their registrants as part of the voter’s pamphlet. Could this be extended to much smaller parties, or perhaps eliminated altogether? Presumably voters who register with the American Independent Party, for example, already actively participate in the campaigns and fund-raising efforts of the party. Are the registration lists available to the parties?
SB 6 only requires that sample ballots be distributed to party registrants. So perhaps there really is not much added cost for including distribution for small parties. If a party wants general distribution of their sample ballot to all voters, let them pay for it.