Mary Norwood is an independent candidate for Chair of the Fulton County, Georgia, County Commission. She needs 22,700 valid signatures by July 13. CBS TV in Atlanta has this story about her struggle to get those signatures.
Fulton County, Georgia, only had 206,160 votes cast for Governor in November 2006. Norwood’s petition hurdle, in practice, thus amounts to getting a number of signatures equal to 11% of all the people who voted in the important gubernatorial election. Also, she must pay a large filing fee, and all her signature sheets must be notarized. The reporter who wrote the story seems dumbfounded that Norwood is even attempting this petition drive.
Just another example where high barriers to independent candidates are caused by partisan primary systems.
You should have mentioned to the reporter that California recently did away with partisan primaries, which reduced the number of signatures needed for all candidates. Fulton County has about the same population as a California Senate district. Under the old law, independent senate candidates required an average of 12,000 signatures. Under the new law which takes effect next January, 40 signatures would be required.
California Proposition 14 makes it more difficult for minor party candidates to qualify for the November ballot than in any other state, except Washington is the same. California voters in November, for Congress and state office, will have fewer options and fewer choices than the voters of any other state in U.S. history. Even Washington state doesn’t curtail write-in votes. Even Ohio in its worst period had a few instances when three candidates were on for U.S. House. Even Florida during its worst period had write-in options, and did Louisiana in its horrible period in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Jim Riley is no friend of voters. He and I had a good phone conversation and he happened to mention that if he had seen a petitioner for the Green Party this spring, he would not have signed the petition. He also said he thinks Texas should require a new party to have over 40,000 attendees at its state convention in order to be on the ballot.
#2 I know you probably won’t listen but let’s try once again.
In California (before Proposition 14), voters had to register expressing their intent to vote at the primary of a political party, before that political party could have a primary. In California, the State conducts party primaries, and they don’t want to waste any money before the voters prove they will show up. If you don’t get 80,000(?) voters to change their registration declaring their intent to vote in the primary, you don’t get a primary, and you don’t get to nominate. This system remains in effect for presidential primaries.
In Texas, the political parties conduct their own primaries or conventions. Instead of saying: prove that you have support before you can hold nominating activities; Texas says get your voters to your party conventions and the nominations they make are valid.
Nominating conventions in Texas are a 4-tiered process: (1) precinct conventions; (2) county conventions; (3) district conventions; and (4) state convention.
It is as the precinct conventions where you are expected to have 40,000 attendees. The precinct conventions are conducted on the same scale as a primary election. In fact, political parties that hold primaries also hold precinct conventions on election night after voting has completed.
So in California, qualification is based on a certain number of voters declaring their intent to participate in a primary; and in Texas it is based on a certain number of voters actually participating in precinct conventions.
There are about 8,000 election precincts in Texas, so that is about 5 attendees per precinct. If you attend a precinct convention, you sign-in in much the same way that you do at a primary election, and become affiliated with a party.
Parties are permitted to consolidate election precincts for primaries and conventions, so they don’t actually need to conduct 8,000 conventions.
The next stage is the county convention. County conventions make nominations for county and precinct offices (precinct in this instance refers to county precincts which are subdivisions of counties used for electing county commissioners, constables and justices of the peace).
The next stage is district conventions. Districts are subdivisions of the state used for electing legislators, the state board of education, US representatives, district judges and district attorneys, and appellate courts. The district conventions nominate candidates at that level.
The final stage is the state convention which nominates statewide candidates.
Texas generously permits political parties to supplement their precinct convention attendee lists with signatures of voters who did not attend the party convention (or participate in a convention of another party, or vote in a primary).
In our phone conversation, Richard Winger asked whether I was surprised that the Green Party had secured enough supplementary signatures, and then said something about me not being able to. I confirmed that I could not have legally signed a petition, and I said that I agreed with the general principle of restricting participation in nominating activities of a single party. It is dubious that I would affiliate with the Green Party. Since, the Green Party could not have circulated its petition until the day after the primary, I could not have signed, and thus would not have signed, even were I inclined to sign the petition of the Green Party.
I’ve known people who believed that they should be able to vote in as many mayoral elections as they could get to on election day, and felt knowledgeable to vote in. I disagree, I think voters should be limited to the one city they live in. The same holds true to political parties.
Proposition 14 makes it easier to be nominated as a write-in candidate. I think the write-in “provision” for general elections in SB 6 is badly written. I don’t know what it means. What is your guess?
Whatever, it contradicts several other sections of the Elections Code, and is not likely to be upheld by a court for that reason alone. The legislature should instead put a sore-loser provision with respect to declared write-in candidates.
Something along the lines of “no candidate in the primary election for a vote-nominated office, whether as an on-ballot candidate or declared write-in candidates, shall be a declared write-in candidate for the general election for the same (or any?) office”.