Even though New York state no longer uses mechanical voting machines, election authorities in that state continue to design ballots as though mechanical voting machines still exist. Here is the New York November 2014 ballot for counties outside New York city. Instead of listing all the candidates for Governor in an uninterrupted column, the ballot squeezes two gubernatorial candidates into the same row. The “Stop Common Core” Party, which is just a Republican Party-supported extra column for Republican nominees, and the Libertarian, are squeezed into column I.
The six qualified parties are entitled to the top six lines, so the Green Party, which has been ballot-qualified for the last two elections, was not at risk of being put into such a bad spot on the ballot.
So why wouldn’t the Libertarians get a better line then Stop Common Core on the inside rather then outside?
That looks like a good opportunity to unite with the Stop Common Core and Republican Party.
It’s too bad that more people don’t know about the unifying voting system of pure proportional representation.
The USA Parliament has been using it for 19 consecutive years and it works great! We at the 9th USA Parliament are not actively trying to change laws, rather we’re building a team of trustworthy team players as a solid foundation, first. Team play means keep your expectations low and when we work hard to better everyone is pleasantly surprised by the good news.
Perhaps one day someone will try to access free speech within the Libertarian Party by running for office so they can hear about how it gets done?
That way we’d be able to promote the positives of unity instead of the same conflict and division we regularly see in politics.
–James Ogle [Free Parliamentary]
Volunteer vote counter, USA Parliament
http://www.usparliament.org
Maybe it’s because the Common Core Party favors friendly cooperation with the Republican Party while the Libertarian Party is biased and brings maliciousness, vile conduct and conflict?
How many sane State regimes have OFFICE BLOC ballots ???
Is it now necessary to put ALL election law stuff into constitutions to stop having the gerrymander MONSTERS mess with election stuff ???/*********/9
That is preposterous. It will be confusing to voters which candidates are the Libertarian candidates, and which are the Stop Common Core candidates. The LP should sue.
New York City is even worse.
There each of the qualified parties gets a column, and the other four are stuck underneath.
The combos are Conservative-Libertarian, Working Families-StopCommonCore, Indpendence-Sapient, and Green-Women’s Equality.
Thank you, Jim. Do you have a link to the New York city ballot?
Of course this was just an oversight. The ballot paper was not long enough to give the Libertarians their on row, even though Common Core appeared to have only one statewide candidate.
Seriously, this could result in some flawed results. Will voters take the time to see that the Libertarian nominee for governor is one column over?
This is probably being done because the “powers that be” are afraid the that Libertarian Party candidate for Governor will receive over 50,000 votes which would give the party automatic ballot access in 2016.
“The ballot paper was not long enough to give the Libertarians their on row,”
So have another page. It’s not a difficult concept.
Andy:
You make a good point. I can see how it would be harder for the Libertarian gubernatorial nominee to poll the 50,000 votes needed for automatic ballot position in 2016.
The “powers that be” will do anything to keep a 3rd party or Independent off the ballot. I would be skeptical of any other answer given by election officials for the strange and unusual way they have placed the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate on the ballot.
Jed Ziggler:
Agreed. But they don’t care how many pages it takes when they place constitutional amendments, etc. on the ballot. But let a 3rd party or Independent ask for more space, “Oh that would cost taxpayers more for the extra paper.” Give me a break!
New York uses polling place scanners, which likely limits the page size. The NY State and NY City boards of elections, went through a long involved process of specifying the scanners, such that most companies dropped out; there is likely some fixed row height and font size in state law; but at least the equipment is partially assembled in New York.
BTW, did you know that San Francisco dropped a system of ranked choice voting so that it could switch to voting machines (the iron behemoth kind).
Does New York State use a lottery to assign ballot slots for new parties that are trying for permanent ballot placement?
Richard, Here’s an NYC ballot: http://electiongateway.com/nyc/sample_ballots/381420/10/2014G1V1_A_Style_371.pdf