Maine requires a group that wishes to be a ballot-qualified party to have at least 5,000 registered members by December 1 of the odd year before an election year. The only group that tried to use this procedure for 2016 is the Libertarian Party, which has been registering members all during 2015. The party has submitted 6,482 voter registration cards. The state will say on or before December 8 whether the party has enough registered members.
This registration procedure in Maine has only existed since 2013. The former procedure was very harsh; the old procedure required a petition of 5% of the last gubernatorial vote, and all the signers had to be registered voters who were not members of a qualified party. That procedure was so severe, it was only used twice, by the Reform Party in 1996 and Americans Elect in 2012. One reason the 2013 session of the legislature changed the procedure was because the Americans Elect experience showed how massively difficult the old procedure was. The old procedure had been created in 1976.
The Green Party is also ballot-qualified in Maine. It got that status by using the independent candidate procedure to place its gubernatorial nominee on the November ballot and then polling over 5% for Governor. The first time the Green Party did that was in 1994, when Jonathan Carter got 6.4%.
The only other time the Libertarian Party was a ballot-qualified party in Maine was in 1991 and 1992. It got that status by having an independent candidate poll over 5% for Governor. The independent, Andrew Adam, after the election was over, told the Secretary of State to assign his votes to the Libertarian Party.
Since I am not aware of any actual Libertarians who worked on this drive, I’d be willing to bet that a higher percent than average of these registrations are what are known as soft registration.
A soft registration is a registration where the person is really not that committed to the party, and may not even really understand what the party is.
A hard registration is a registration where the person is likely to vote Libertarian, engage in Libertarian activism, and who actually understands what a Libertarian is.
I bet a lot of the people just registered Libertarian because they stopped to sign the marijuana legalization petition, and I bet a lot of them have little understanding of what a Libertarian is.
So the question is how many hard registrations vs soft registrations? I bet more are soft.
As a Maine Green and socialist, I strongly support the recognition of the Libertarian Party. The two-party system has silenced alternative voices for far too long. We don’t agree on many political principles, but I have always found the Libertarian Party members that I’ve worked with to be thoughtful and sincere people with whom I do share quite a bit in common. Good luck Libertarians!
If Maine were to adopt Top 2, it would not have a reason to impose such a high barrier to party recognition.
5,000 registered voters under your party banner is not that bad of a requirement, even in low population Maine.
The only reason for such a high limit would be because of the expense of conducting a primary.
As you noted, the 5000 is likely soft supporters. If a party wanted to wage an effective campaign, with lots of legislative candidates, and GOTV, you would probably want 5000 hard supporters.
But there is no reason for the government to dictate that level.
“As you noted, the 5000 is likely soft supporters.”
Whenever you conduct a partisan voter registration drive, you are going to get some soft registrations and some hard registrations, but the key is, or should be, to get as high a percentage as you can of the registrations be hard registrations.
It is more difficult to get a hard registration than it is to get a soft registration, because you have to actually give people a more detailed explanation as to what a Libertarian is, and it helps if you provide them with some party literature that they can take with them.
A soft registration collection looks more like this: “Hey man, sign this petition to legalize weed.” Then as the person is signing, “Hey man, can you fill this out for me too (points to voter registration card)? This is for a party that wants to legalize weed.”
So the person walks away thinking that they just signed something to legalize marijuana, which they did, but not knowing much about the party banner which they just registered under. They may even hold a bunch of anti-libertarian views on other issues.
Collecting hard registrations takes more finesse, and is really only something that is going to be done by people who are actually Libertarians themselves, and not just some mercenary who is out to make a buck.
This is not to say that a mercenary can’t get a hard Libertarian registration, as they could encounter somebody who already self identifies as a libertarian, but who just is not registered to vote as a libertarian, but given that I have been on the ground working on petition and voter registration drives for over 15 years and in 33 states, I know how these mercenary registration drives operate. Let’s just say that they are generally pretty short on substance or any kind of activism beyond doing the bare minimum to get people to sign.
So given that I don’t think that any actual Libertarians worked on this registration drive, and given what I know about how mercenaries operate, I’d be willing to bet that a higher percent of these registrations are soft registrations than hard registrations than if all of the work had been done by actual Libertarians.
If you are conducting a voter registration drive, you are invariably going to get some soft registrations, but the goal should be to get as many hard registrations as possible along with the soft registrations. Hard registrations can equal more people voting for your candidates, more party members, and more activists. Soft registrations can get you on the ballot in some states, and that’s nice, but it does not indicate a lot of strong supporters.
If a party has 5000 hard supporters, they might be able to get 500 or 1000 (made up number) to actively participate in the party – attending meetings, running for office, campaigning.
But that would be true whether or not the 5000 persons are in a government registry of political beliefs.
Do you believe that someone should be required to make a public statement of their political beliefs in order to participate in a government-funded election?