The North Carolina House had scheduled a vote on Monday, June 26, on SB 656, the ballot access bill. However some legislators objected that the bill’s provision of 5,000 signatures for a statewide independent is too low, so the bill will probably go back to the House Elections Committee to discuss that objection. The bill provides 10,000 signatures for newly-qualifying parties.
Would it be constitutional for a voter to obtain signatures from other qualified voters for permission to publish a book? No! If the First Amendment prohibits such prior censorship for a book why is allowed for publishing a vote on a ballot?
One anomaly I noticed in the current bill is that as it stands it would take 5,000 valid signatures to run unaffiliated for US Senate but around 9,000 for US House.
All these quotas to ration an artificial scarcity of space on the ballot are arbitrary self-dealing between the two parties who have entrenched themselves into a cartel to control the ballot and limit voter choice.