Bill Gardner, New Hampshire Secretary of State, may lose his job. In New Hampshire, the legislature appoints the Secretary of State. Democrats have a majority in both houses. The Democratic caucus has endorsed Colin Van Ostern for the job. See this story.

Gardner has done more harm to ballot access than any other Secretary of State who is now in office. Under his influence, the New Hampshire legislature has steadily made ballot access worse and worse, with no changes for the better. Unfortunately the legislature always seems to do as he wishes. He initiated a bill to change the vote test for parties to remain on the ballot from 3% to 4%, which happened late in 1996. He also made the procedures for the party petition worse. Originally that very difficult party petition (3% of the last gubernatorial vote) could circulate at any time, but he had the law changed so that the petition cannot circulate during odd years. Also, originally, when a party did the party petition, it could then nominate by convention in August and choose any candidates who were members of the party. But he persuaded the legislature to require that candidates nominated at the convention must have filed a declaration of candidacy in June, before the party petition’s success might not even be known. This even applies to presidential candidates.

New Hampshire is one of a few states that still uses a party column ballot. Every time the Libertarian Party has managed to qualify as a party, he puts all the independent candidates in the same column that the Libertarians use. The heading is always, “Libertarian and Other Candidates.” It would be unthinkable for him to do that to the Republican or the Democratic column.

Even though the New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that the order of party columns must be random, he has not applied that principle of neutrality to order of candidates within each party column. In 2008, when two Libertarian presidential candidates qualified for the November ballot, Bob Barr and George Phillies, he arbitrarily listed Phillies above Barr in the “Other Candidates” column (the Libertarian Party didn’t have its own party column that year).

Gardner refuses to allow an unqualified party to use substitution for either President or Vice-President. Thus an unqualified party can’t begin to circulate its presidential petition until it knows the identity of its national ticket. Gardner has vigorously defended the state law that says only members of the two largest parties can be members of precinct officials.

Many bills to ease the New Hampshire ballot access laws have been introduced in the last 20 years. Gardner or his Assistant always testify against these bills. There have been bills to let voters sign for more than one candidate for a particular office, to ease the vote test, to let small qualified parties nominate by convention, and to ease the number of signatures for the party petition, but Gardner has opposed all of them, so they never pass.