Monday, June 23, is the Illinois deadline for minor party and independent candidate petitions. The Libertarian Party is submitting 43,992 signatures for its statewide slate; the Green Party is submitting approximately 29,900 signatures for its statewide slate; the Constitution Party is submitting 30,600 signatures. In Illinois, any filing is accepted, even if it lacks the number of signatures set forth in the law. However, any petition is potentially subject to challenge from private individuals. The state requires 25,000 signatures for statewide petitions.
Can we challenge the main party petitions as well?
At no time in U.S. history has any state required Democratic or Republican Party nominees to submit petitions to qualify for the general election ballot. The closest that ever happened was in Louisiana in 1916, when the law required the Republican Party to submit a petition to get its presidential nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, on the general election ballot. He needed 1,000 signatures. However, a state court ruled that the law violated due process, and in the end the Republicans didn’t need such a petition. Later the legislature eased the definition of “political party” so that the Republicans qualified automatically.
That is a lot of work to get a slate ticket. When people work together to achieve fairness across the board for everyone then the results of their work will be much more powerful.
But by being self-separated, self-marginalized and self-exclusionary, the democratically illegit party bosses in the Libertarian, Green and Constitution Parties, are actually only serving to snuff out their own potential.
Do you want to try unity, teamwork and action for the good of the all, all parties and independents the more the better?
Try pure proportional representation (PR)!
The 9th USA Parliament has been using PR for 19 consecutive years and it works great!
Won’t you join us?
http://www.usparliament.org
If the Supreme Court ever rules that different hurdles to ballot access based on partisan considerations are illegal we may just end all this petitioning and such. Ending gerrymandering sure would help too IMO.
Well, it looks like the Libertarians will be on the ballot either way.
I was a volunteer in the Illinois Green Party petition drive, managing to add some signatures to their total. 30,000 is quite the narrow margin though…it’s almost a dead certainty that the Illinois Democrats will challenge us unless Quinn feels the bad PR of restricting voter choice when many voters really don’t want to vote for either him or Rauner wouldn’t be worth it. I put the odds of the ILGP making it onto the ballot for the state slate at 50/50 given the variables.
The Constitution Party won’t make it if they’re challenged, but they probably wouldn’t get much of the vote if they did make it. They’re not very well known in Illinois, unlike the Green Party.
The whole petitioning process is just overly restrictive bunk. And people wonder why the world is starting to think differently of us, when our country is drowning in hypocrisies.