This news story says that the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party, which has its own primary in Minnesota, will try to keep insincere candidates from filing in its primary.
Minnesota has an open primary. There is no registration by party, and any voter is free to file to run in any party’s primary; also any voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
What kind of people do they think run for office?
Pretty much anybody who is using a party’s ballot access as a means to get themselves elected and don’t actually care about what the party stands for. It reminds me of something that happened in Arkansas where a Republican incumbent ran under the Green label, got re-elected, and switched back to the GOP for that very reason.
If the law says anyone can run under that label than so be it. The law is the law.
That is a stupid law. A party should be able to control who uses its ballot label, otherwise the label doesn’t mean anything and could be deceptive so what’s the point of even having it? But then the problem is having a government run primary determine a party’s candidates. It should be a process run by the party, whether convention, caucus or privately run and financed primary.
Lie detector tests for candidates ???
How loyal is loyal ??? 50 pct ?? 75 pct ??? 99 pct ???
One more UN-Const machination.
Up to the party to decide how loyal is loyal, or at least it should be.
PUBLIC nominations and elections for PUBLIC offices by PUBLIC Electors/Voters.
Brain dead courts and media.
The nomination is to represent a party name. That party name has to mean something, so the party leadership has to protect that name by deciding who does and doesn’t get to use it. Brain dead azmunch.
PARTIES = FACTIONS/FRACTIONS OF PUBLIC ELECTORS — N-O-T INDEPENDENT ELECTION LAW EMPIRES.
SEE NOW OLDE TEXAS WHITE PRIMARY CASES.
SEE 1989 EU CASE RE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PUBLIC AND INTERNAL CLUBBY PARTY STUFF.
TOO MANY REALLY STUPID BRAIN DEAD POSTERS REGARDING BASIC CONLAW ELECTION STUFF.
Why would anyone put time and money into running, maintaining and growing an organization with a ballot label anyone else can scoop in and misuse? Corporations, individuals, churches, charities, nonprofits, and every other type of organization have the right to their name and to choose who can use it and who can’t. It’s completely absurd to not give political parties the same protection. They lose 100% of their value if they can’t protect their name.
And they do have a clear value to both voters and candidates. Voters are busy and don’t always have time to research every individual candidate for every office. Candidates often lack time, money and access to lists of potential supporters, which parties help provide. All of that value is destroyed by eliminating party ownership over their own party names. The solution is to eliminate government run or financed primaries. Parties should be 100% in charge of and responsible for however they choose to select their candidates.
PARTY GANGSTERS CAN ALWAYS ENDORSE THEIR PARTY HACKS/PUPPETS AND DENOUNCE ALL FAKE PARTY HACKS
—– LOVED BY MEDIA HACKS TO SHOW CHAOS.
Longtime Reader, that Arkansas Green elected legislator switched to the Democratic Party after he had been elected, not the Republican Party. Actually there were two such elected Greens and they both left the Green Party to be Democrats.
@az, Ed,
Maybe the GLC could determine whether the candidate inhaled or not.
Remove party logos and party names from ballots.
The government should not be in the business of determining which candidates or supporters are Mugwumps.
The party, not the government, should be in charge of determining which candidates are mugwumps . As Adam explained, party labels convey useful information to voters, but only if the parties control the use of those labels. This is especially true for parties and candidates which are not well financed or connected.
“PARTY GANGSTERS CAN ALWAYS ENDORSE THEIR PARTY HACKS/PUPPETS AND DENOUNCE ALL FAKE PARTY HACKS”
This works a lot better for the parties that have lots of money and media access than the ones which don’t.
@Ed,
How would an ordinary voter be familiar with the platform of a party and the process by which it selected its candidates, but at the same not know who its candidates were?
Do even small parties have internet sites to ENDORSE THEIR PARTY HACKS/PUPPETS AND DENOUNCE ALL FAKE PARTY HACKS ???
What percent of voters with NO internet access ???
Jim Riley,
An ordinary voter doesn’t need to be familiar with the platform details or candidate selection process of a smaller party, and indeed a vanishingly small percentage of voters are that familiar. But a large portion of voters are familiar with the general policy direction a ballot label such as libertarian, green, socialist etc conveys due to the cumulative effort of past candidates, party officials and representatives doing media and outreach of various sorts, etc, over the years and decades.
Those labels convey a lot more information to voters as a result, compared to a candidate who is not wealthy, famous, connected, etc. All of that value is lost if the labels are either not on the ballot or can be misused by candidates with views in a completely different direction from what the party label is supposed to convey.
Az,
Of course most voters have internet access. Very, very few of them have any interest in using that access to scour the websites of minor parties for whether they endorse candidates who appear on the ballot with their label. They take the label on faith because their level of interest is relatively low.
Expecting the average voter to proactively seek out information about whether a minor party approves of the candidates using its ballot label is like expecting the average consumer to be intimately familiar with the board of directors, supply chain, sourcing, and other insider details of every company whose products they buy. It’s completely unrealistic and delusional to have such expectations of average voters or consumers, even if all the information is readily available online.
Allowing party labels to be hijacked is like allowing product labels to be hijacked by competitors in store shelves. Expecting voters to know they were hijacked is like expecting consumers to know if a product label was hijacked every time they buy something, if product label hijacking was made legal.
And not allowing party labels at all is like requiring generic labels on every product on the store shelves.
@Ed,
If there were no party labels, then an ordinary voter could seek information about the candidates.
Under a party label system, does the state electoral apparatus ensure that the “Libertarian” candidate is indeed a libertarian or was chosen by libertarians? Do you want your government making that determination?
An ordinary voter could seek such information, but very few do or will.
The state electoral apparatus doesn’t need to ensure if a candidate of party x comports to the ideology or other requirements of party x. That’s the job of the party. The state will have a party x organization on file and that organization will communicate to the state electoral apparatus who it’s candidates are. This happens now, and usually works. In cases where party x leadership is in dispute, sometimes the courts have to intervene to make a determination, but that is relatively rare.
It works better than placing unrealistic expectations on ordinary voters to research minor party candidates on their own.
@Ed,
If there were no party labels, the ‘Libertarian” candidate is likely to receive more votes.
Not necessarily. They may receive fewer votes. And more importantly, their candidacy neither carries nor helps build a brand that carries over to other candidates. The votes they receive will mean less, because they will mostly be based on things like mistaken name recognition, candidate order of appearance on the ballot, perceived ethnicity/gender, whether their name “sounds cool,” and less often on even approximate issue direction.
@Ed,
With party labels, there will 10 or 20 times as many votes for Republican or Democrat candidates by generally ignorant or uninformed voters.
Again, not necessarily. Republicans and Democrats have a lot more resources for promoting, and getting media coverage, for their preferred candidates. If you have dozens of democrats and republicans on the general election ballot, unlabeled or false labeled minor party candidates really get lost in the shuffle. If you use a top X system they get even more lost since on top of that many voters don’t even pay attention at all until after they’re eliminated.
I was involved in the lawsuit involving so-called “sham” candidates nominated in the Arizona Green Party primaries in 2010. Here is how that turned out:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/82354061/green-party-loses-in-court-arizona/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/102432115/9-disputed-green-candidates-to-stay-on/
At the time, a friend who had been active in New York’s Right to Life Party told me that the chair of that party was never bothered by pro-choice candidates who ran on the Right to Life party line because nearly everyone who saw their name on the ballot would assume they were anti-abortion and it would help the party’s cause, which was not to win elective office but to support a ban on abortion. Most legislative districts, state or federal, strongly favor one major party or another, so in them, why would this Minnesota pro-legalization of cannabis party care if someone not connected with their group be running on their ballot line? These candidates would be furthering their goal of creating support for changing marijuana laws.