On August 9, Rocky De La Fuente filed a brief in his case against the California requirement that an independent presidential candidate submit 178,039 signatures to get on the ballot. De La Fuente v Padilla, c.d., 2:16cv-3242. No other candidate, except a presidential candidate, ever needs more than 65 signatures to get on a California ballot for partisan office. No one has complied with the California statewide independent petition requirement since 1992. De La Fuente is the first independent presidential candidate in California history to sue against the independent presidential petition, which has been in the law since 1976.
Richard If De La Fuente were to get the courts to hear the case and then actually win it could it be applied to other candidates in California in this election cycle or would they have to wait ?
Possibly, but the candidate would need to show that he or she has a modicum of support. Some courts have in the past measured that by seeing how many other states put the candidate on the ballot. Eugene McCarthy was treated that way in 1976, in five states. He didn’t submit a petition but the courts put him on anyway because the law was unconstitutional and he showed that he had qualified in dozens of other states.
Richard, I am not holding my breath on the court’s use of your logic. If they put Rocky on, they will obviously also have to put Darrell Castle on (“he showed that he had qualified in dozens of other states”).
A problem is that if a court sets a threshold of 65 signatures for President there will likely be 100s or 1000s of candidates for President in 2020. The only real barrier would be the need to find 55 Californians to serve as elector candidates.
California should base the number of signatures on the votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election in the territory. For example, if the threshold were 1/10 of 1%, it would 7318 signatures for statewide office.
The filing fee should be converted to an alternative for signatures based on 10 minutes per signature at minimum wage. So for statewide office in California it would be $12,196; with a candidate able to mix the two (one signature = $1.67).
While this might seem high, it would greatly reduce the filing fee for the State senate and Assembly and US representative.
“A problem is that if a court sets a threshold of 65 signatures for President there will likely be 100s or 1000s of candidates for President in 2020.”
And this is a “problem” because …
” ‘A problem is that if a court sets a threshold of 65 signatures for President there will likely be 100s or 1000s of candidates for President in 2020.’
And this is a ‘problem’ because … ”
It’s a problem because we don’t have hundreds of votes so the winner of the election is generally the candidate with the largest cult following – a hillary or trump type candidate, sometimes. With approval voting (vote for as many as you like) the number of candidates wouldn’t impact your voting “majority” required to win the election. If you assume all candidates are roughly equal in quality then the actual number of people electing a candidate will be something like 1/z where z = number of candidates. With 100 candidates we can have a winner with just over 1% of the vote!
Plurality systems become tyranny systems when the number of candidates vs voters gets too high.
The other problem is that each extra page of ballot for mail-in states costs big $$$. So ideally any candidate would pay 1/x of the cost for a new page (of 6 million voters or so?) where x is the number of candidates that can be fit onto a page.