On February 18, Pennsylvania State Senator Mike Folmer re-introduced his ballot access bill, SB 495. It cuts the number of signatures for independent candidates from 2% of the winning candidate’s vote in the last election to the smaller numbers that are required for major party candidates to get on a primary ballot. Current law requires 2,000 signatures for statewide primary candidates.
The bill says a party is qualified to nominate by convention if it has registration membership of one-twentieth of 1%, but less than 15%. Current law requires all parties to have registration of 15% in order to avoid having to submit hefty petitions for their nominees. If the bill were to be enacted, the Libertarian and Green Parties would be on the November ballot automatically.
The bill is sponsored by five Republicans and five Democrats. The five Republicans are Senators Folmer, Mario Scavello, Lisa Baker, Kim Ward, and Patricia Vance. The five Democrats are Senators Rob Teplitz, John Yudichak, Anthony Williams, John Blake, and Lisa Boscola. The bill has been introduced in previous sessions and never made any headway. However, this year, Senator Folmer is chair of the committee that has jurisdiction over the bill. Also there are two federal ballot access cases pending, both of which are likely to win.
I will be contacting my Senator, Joe Scarnati.
Do you mean to tell me the Constitution[al] Party has this many people registered to vote in Pennsylvania? I didn’t know that many people in Pennsylvania were opposed to Social Security and Medicare.
Thanks to Alabama Independent, I corrected the original post. The original post said the Constitution Party also had enough, but that was an error. That party only had 1,422 registrants at the end of 2014, whereas the bill would require about 4,500 registrants.