On March 23, the Maine Joint Standing Committee on State and Local Government held a hearing on LD 545. This is the bill to ease the number of signatures for a member of a small qualified party to get on that party’s primary ballot. Current Maine law requires 2,000 signatures of party members, for a statewide candidate, regardless of how many registered voters that party has. The bill would amend the law to require the smaller of 2,000 signatures, or 2% of the number of people registered in that party.

The Green Party presented several witnesses who described the extreme difficulty of getting the signatures of 2,000 party members, in a limited time, for a party that has 37,000 registered voters. The committee seemed receptive to the bill and will soon hold a work session to finalize the bill.