Alabama has the nation’s most severe mandatory petition requirement for statewide party recognition, 3% of the last gubernatorial vote. No other state has a mandatory party recognition petition that is above 2% of the last vote cast.
However, the Alabama petition requirement for 2024 and 2026 is now lower than it was for 2020 and 2022. The 2020 and 2022 petition required 51,588 signatures. But the future petition is 42,459 signatures, due to a lower voter turnout in November 2022 than in November 2018.
The word “mandatory” means that the petition is required if a new party is to appear on the ballot. California, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, have two procedures for new parties to appear on the ballot. For example, California has a 10% petition, but it is not mandatory, because a group that doesn’t want to use it is free to use the .33% registration procedure.
The .33% voter registration requirement is probably more difficult than the 10% petition requirement in California, given the difficulty of getting people to register to vote under the name of a new party of which they mostly likely not familiar.
Parties that have got on by registration in California since 1960 have been Peace & Freedom, American Independent, Libertarian, Green, Natural Law, and Reform. The only party that got on by the 10% during that period was Americans Elect. So that tells me the registration method is easier, especially given that it was somewhat higher (1% of the last gub. vote) before 2013
The Common Sense Party just failed to get on the California ballot via voter registrations twice in a row.
Maybe that’s because there are too few Californians with common sense.
No, it was because, a) it is difficult getting people to register to vote under the banner of a party of which they are not familiar, and b) some of the people hired to collect the registrations for the Common Sense Party engaged in fraud.
Why should parties appear on the ballot? Elections are for real individuals not collectivities.
Nor should the names of candidates be printed by the state ballot monopoly. Let the voters write-in their uncensored choices. No petition quotas, no registration quotas, no candidate “filing fees”, no “official” parties acting as government agencies with party primary elections to “winnow” out the dissident candidates. No “sore loser” censorship.
But, hey, if you don’t trust you neighbor to vote, they won’t trust you either.
What if 10 candidates all claimed to be the Libertarian Party candidate for some office, say Governor, but only one of them was officially nominated/endorsed by the party. Say at least one of the non-official Libertarian candidates had a lot of money, and they advertised themselves as a Libertarian Party candidate for Governor, and since the LP gets little media coverage, and has little money for advertising, most of the public who pays any attention to this stuff thought that the unofficial candidate was the official candidate, and given that 10 candidates in the race were claiming to be Libertarian Party candidates for Governor, the general public had no idea which one was the actual Libertarian Party candidate for Governor, so the Libertarian vote for Governor got split between 10 candidates, with the actual official Libertarian Party candidate for Governor getting only a tiny percentage of the vote, much less than if only one Libertarian Party candidate was in the race.
Note that in the 2020 presidential election, there were 17 states where Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen was the only candidate on the ballot besides Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and that Jorgensen tended to receive a higher percentage of vote in those states where she was the only alternative candidate on the ballot.
There should be no ballot. Elections should be in the style of a caucus, town meeting or in person party convention. Qualified voters, who should be far fewer than there are now, should meet in their precinct gathering place in the evening and stand in a corner or section of the room for their party. There would be opportunity for each party to have x number of speakers to try to persuade people to their corner.
Why by party? Voting for each office this way could last all night, for one thing.
How would parties determine their candidates? However they want. A party could choose to wait to see if they win to even bother with choosing candidates as well.
INDIVIDUALS are nominated/elected– NOT *parties*.
Total brain dead courts since 1968 – Williams v Rhodes
That’s not necessarily true. Some states still have a one click party vote option. In most countries people actually only vote for a Party, and that party has it’s own internal nomination process. That system makes more sense to me, at least that part. Secret votes and ballots don’t. Open in person meeting voting is way better. And drastically limiting the electorate.