On August 4, the Massachusetts Green Party turned in more than 10,000 valid signatures to qualify its statewide slate of nominees. The party is virtually certain to poll more than 3% for one of its nominees, so it will be on the 2012 ballot as a qualified party automatically.
The Libertarian Party is now the only ballot-qualified party in Massachusetts (other than the Democratic and Republican Parties), but it will cease to be qualified after November 2010 because it is not running any candidates in its own primary.
The process for getting a candidate on the primary ballot seems to be on the excessive paperwork side. Is this true and would it be easier to simply collect the 10,000 signatures, then running someone for statewide office. It seems that if a party has ballot status, you need to work and keep it.
The Massachusetts Green Party candidates needed that many signatures because the party did NOT have ballot status. To keep ballot status a party needs to have received 3% of the vote in the last state-wide election. The last state-wide election was in 2008 (special elections don’t count, I think, but anyway there was no Green candidate this January). The only state-wide position was President, and the Green candidate, Cynthia McKinney, did not get 3% in Massachusetts. Thus the party lost its ballot status.
Kinda knuckle-headed for the Libertarians to not run a candidate to save their ballot access.
Massachusetts, along with South Dakota and Maine, is a state that makes it very difficult for candidates of a small ballot-qualified party to get on their own party”s primary ballot. New York is also bad on this variable for district office (but not statewide office). Even Republicans have a hard time in Massachusetts getting themselves on the Republican primary ballot, which is why some years half the US House seats in that state have no Republican nominee. Massachusetts badly needs activism to fix the primary ballot access laws. The Massachusetts newspapers seem oblivious to the problem.