Maine LD 1571 makes moderate improvements in ballot access for newly-qualifying parties. It says that the deadline for a group to obtain 5,000 registered members is January of the election year, rather than December of the year before the election.

More importantly, it says that a newly-qualifying party has two elections before it must meet the requirements for a party to remain on. The standard for a party to remain on is that it have 10,000 registered members who actually cast a ballot in a general election.

Finally, the bill clarifies that the Libertarian Party is a qualified party for 2018. But in November 2018, if the law remains unchanged, the Libertarian Party must have more than 10,000 registered voters, because it must have 10,000 registered members who cast a ballot in November 2018.

The new law is still subject to court challenge. The deadline of January of an election year is still preposterously early. Also the law on how a party remains on the ballot is not sensible. If a party has enough support to be recognized in its first year if it has 5,000 registrants, why should it have more than 10,000 to remain on, several years later? If Maine would let a party keep its registrants when it goes off the ballot, a party that went off the ballot for not having 10,000 registrants could instantly come back into legal existence, because it would have had at least 5,000, so it could instantly again be qualified. The problem with that is that when a new party ceases to be qualified in Maine, election officials convert all its members instantly to independents, a policy that itself is probably unconstitutional. Courts in Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Oklahoma have ruled that states must let voters register into unqualified parties as well as qualified ones.