On May 28, the Nevada Assembly Legislative Operations and Elections Committee passed SB 292. It makes ballot access for new and previously unqualified parties more difficult. It moves the petition deadline to late April, and imposes a severe distribution requirement. The petition would need to include approximately 3,400 signatures from each of the four U.S. House districts.
There has not been an abundance of minor parties on the ballot anyway, so I fail to see the motivation for this.
Ironically, the Libertarian Party could actually benefit from this as long as they can remain ballot qualified, which I think they can, so long as they do not pass another law to make it more difficult to remain a ballot qualified party. Why? Less competition. If I were a Nevada state legislator, I would still vote no on this out of principle. Making it more difficult to get on the ballot is unreasonable.
Nevada currently requires 13,557 valid petition signatures to qualify a party for the ballot. This is already a pretty difficult requirement for a state with around 3.1 million and something people.
It has been several years since anyone successfully completed the party status petition in NV. There is no rational argument for making the law more difficult there.
Since it introduces a straight ticket device, it would be hurtful to any third parties or independents, even those whose parties are already qualified. What’s more, that qualification is tenuous and has been endangered in recent elections. The straight ticket is the bigger deal though. It is very injurious to anyone who is not a Democrat or Republican. The only silver lining is that states have been getting rid of it and very few still have it.
According to comments from Richard Winger on a prior post, no state that had not previously had a straight ticket ever created one. Up until now, every state that had a straight ticket has had them ever since they had government ballots, except Michigan which briefly got rid of it but then brought it back through a multi-subject initiative.
In the likely event this bill passes and is signed into law – the Senate and Assembly both have Democratic majorities and the Governor is a Democrat, and the Democrats are behind this bill and approved it on a party line vote in the Senate – Nevada will become the first state to add a straight ticket which did not previously have it. Not only will this be bad for anyone running as anything other than a Democrat or Republican in Nevada, it will be bad for anyone running as anything other than a Democrat or Republican in any state. That’s because state legislators often copy bills from other states, so if it passes in Nevada, it’s likely to be copied in other states.
The motivation for this bill had more to do with the straight ticket than with third parties. Third parties were an afterthought, and have been a very minor side item in the debate and coverage of the legislation, other than here. The side swipe at third parties is included because the Democrats don’t want the Green Party to qualify in closely divided Nevada. The Green Party is not presently qualified, but came close recently, and Democrats believe that may hurt their chances if the Greens do qualify in the future.
Oh, I did not realize creating a straight ticket device was part of this bill. This is even more reason to oppose it.
I think that the LP of Nevada has enough voter registrations, that is people who checked the Libertarian Party box on their voter registration form, to remain ballot qualified via voter registrations, but even so, this is a really bad bill in principle and the LP of NV should oppise it. The straight ticket device would definitely hurt LP vote totals, and if the LP of NV were to ever lose ballot access, they’d have a much harder time regaining it if this bill is passed.
One good thing I can say about gathering petition signatures in Nevada is that it is clearly defined in the Nevada statutes that state and local government buildings have to allow petition circulators to be able to gather petition signatures there, and the same with polling places, including polling places at stores or shopping centers, and early voting us big in Nevada (the polling places make you stand or set up a certain number of feet away, but it is not so far as to make them unworkable). These things are supposed to be legal in every state, however, most states do not make this explicitly clear in their statutes, so you have to rely in court rulings and the CONSTITUTIOn (both federal and state), and the local government officials will often ignore these things, or claim ignorance, and run petition circulators out anyway. It is harder for them to do this in Nevada at these locations since there is a statute which says people have a right to collect petition signatures at these locations.
I have never worked a party or candidate petition in Nevada, but I have worked on ballot initiative petitions there on a couple of occasions. The bad thing about working petitions in Nevada is that there are lots of people there not from Nevada, or not registered to vote, and Nevada also has a higher percentage if frequent movers as compared to most states, so there’s a higher percentage of people who are not sure which address they put on their voter registration.
The Green Party did not even really try t9 get on the NV ballot for 2020. They did try for 2016, but they waited too long to get started, and then they made the mistake of hiring some scumbag mercenary petition circulators who turned in a bunch of forged signatures, so they did not qualify for the ballot there in 20q6. I think the last time the Green Party was on the ballot in Nevada was either 2012 or 2014.
2016 is recent enough for the Democrats behind this. They realize the Greens may well qualify if they get a strong statewide or presidential ticket in the future, so they want to make that harder.
Last I checked libertarians are just short of remaining qualified through voter registration. They have crossed the threshold before, but just barely. They’ve remained qualified through vote results, but that hasn’t always been a gimme either. I don’t remember the exact year or years, but they made it by the skin of their teeth not that long ago.
To be precise, I said no state that didn’t have the straight-ticket device in its original government-printed ballot every added it. I worded that carefully because in Michigan, the legislature repealed it but then there was a referendum petition organized by labor and the Democratic Party which put the device back in place. So Nevada would not have been the first state to add it, just the first state to add it that hadn’t had it in its original government-printed ballot law. But, the straight-ticket device part of the bill seems gone now. The amendment deleting the straight-ticket device was made by the chairwoman of the Assembly committee that handles election law bills, so it seems clear that part of the bill is dead.
I did mention Michigan and how Nevada is different.