During the years 1970 through 2016, there have been 10,463 regularly-scheduled U.S. House elections (this includes Delegate from the District of Columbia for the years 1972-2016; there was no such election in D.C. in 1970). During those years, there have been 7,220 U.S. House candidates on the ballot who were not the nominees of the Democratic or Republican Parties.

The state with the fewest non-Democratic, non-Republican candidates on the ballot for U.S. House during those years has been Georgia. There has been only one individual, Billy McKinney (Cynthia McKinney’s father), who ever appeared on a regularly-scheduled Georgia ballot in the period 1970 to the present and who was not a Democratic or Republican nominee. He was able to qualify because the normal Georgia petitioning requirement was suspended the year he ran, 1982, in the two Atlanta districts, due to late redistricting.

Every other state has had at least twelve minor party or independent candidates for U.S. House on the ballot, during the period 1970-2016. The state with the most such candidates was California: 983 such candidates. This isn’t surprising, because California was the state with the most seats during that period.

Besides Georgia, the states with the fewest candidates have been: South Dakota 12, West Virginia 12, New Mexico 16, Montana 17, and North Dakota 17. The June 1, 2016 print issue of B.A.N. will contain a chart showing the number of candidates in each state, in each year 1970 through 2016.

The reason Georgia has had no candidates on the ballot (in years when its regular petition requirement was in effect) is that its requirement is so impossibly difficult. The law requires a petition of 5% of the number of registered voters. No one has complied with it since 1964. Back in 1964, when one independent, Milton Lent, did qualify, Georgia did not check the validity of such petitions, did not require petition sheets to be notarized, did not require the petitions until October, and there were no counties split by a congressional district boundary. The 1964 session of the legislature moved the deadline to an earlier date, imposed notarization, imposed petition validity checks, and changed the boundaries of the U.S. House districts to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s one person-one vote rulings so that counties had to be split.