No Labels Will Attempt to Qualify as a Party in California

No Labels is about to launch a voter registration drive in California, to become a qualified party. It will use the registration method. It must persuade approximately 73,000 individuals to list No Labels as their party of membership, on voter registration forms.

Americans Elect, which was somewhat similar, qualified in California in 2011, using the more difficult method, a petition of 10% of the last gubernatorial vote. Americans Elect was a qualified party in California in 2012 and 2014, and had a few candidates, but didn’t run anyone for president.


Comments

No Labels Will Attempt to Qualify as a Party in California — 22 Comments

  1. Was this an official announcement from the No Labels Party? Did you get this from their website, or a news article, or what?

    Getting people to register to vote under the banner they have never heard of and which has no track record or no big name announced candidate, is very difficult. The Common Sense Party tried this for the 2020 and 2022 elections in California, and they failed both times, in spite of them shelling out lots of money for voter registrations.

    Voter registration drives tend to have q higher percentage of fraud than do petitions, or at least fraud is caught more often on voter registration drives than petition drives.

    It is easier to get people to sign a petition to place a minor party or minor party candidate on the ballot than it is to get them to register to vote under the banner of a minor party, especially if they have never heard of the minor party in question.

    I could see an argument for the No Labels Party to do the voter registration drive in California if they were intending to form a long term political party that was going to run candidates for lots of offices, but the No Labels Party has already publicly stated that their only concern is the 2024 presidential race, and that around May of 2024 they decide that they are content with who the Democrats and Republicans nominate that they will drop out of the election. So for this reason, I think it makes more sense for them to do the petition.

    Doing the voter registration drive instead of the petition drive may end up being a mistake for them. I can cite multiple examples of voter registration fraud happening during voter registration drives in California, including the last two elections with the Common Sense Party.

  2. From the latest California registration data (https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ror/ror-odd-year-2023/complete-ror.pdf), there are 4,941,314 voters in the state registered as No Party Preference. 73,000 of those is 1.48%. Not sure what the costs are of obtaining voter addresses on the left coast, but a valid strategy would be to do that and market specifically to these NP voters. Going from No Party to No Labels is not much of a stretch.

  3. Getting people to switch from No Party Preference to No Labels Party is no easy. Lots of people who are not registered under a party banner do not want to be registered under a party banner.

    This is a tough sell.

  4. Have an address list of people registered No Party Preference would not be very helpful for this. They could mail all of those people letters and voter registration forms asking them to switch, but almost all of the mailers would end up in the trash with very little response.

    They could trying sending people out to all of those houses, but lots of people won’t be home or will not answer the door, and even out of those who do answer the door the rejection rate would be very high. It would also cost more money to hire people to do this door-to-door.

    They are going to try to piggyback the voter registrations off of initiative or referendum petitions that are paying or will pay this year in California.

    That is what the Common Sense Party did twice in California, and they failed and had lots of fraud accusations both times. The biggest difference is that the No Labels Party has more money to throw around than the Common Sense Party has.

  5. I’m not sure why they’re even bothering in California since, even with the mass exodus, it’s such a solid blue state. From what I’ve read, their targets are swing states to either help or hurt Trump, depending on how you read them.

  6. They should definitely just make a deal with the Common Sense Party.

    I think there are still a lot of centrists in California who may consider voting for a No Labels candidate.

  7. The Common Sense Party has not ballot access in California, and if the No Labels Party runs a candidate, they want that candidate to be under the No Labels Party label.

  8. Wouldn’t that make it a label? How can they be a bipartisan effort of Democrats and Republicans and a third party at the same time? Talk about truth in advertising!

  9. A centrist third party doesn’t need that kind of branding. No Labels, Common Sense and Forward should be thought as the same. No Labels should throw their money at Common Sense to increase their chances.

  10. They have no interest or affiliation with any other centrist party. They have plenty of money for ballot access and want to have their own brand, whether it’s just for the presidential race one time only or anything more, and even if it’s just an insurance policy based on who the Democrats and Republicans seem likely to nominate and polling results by May of next year. They will probably qualify in all the states to give themselves maximum leverage for media coverage and whatever else even though they will focus on swing states. The voter reg method costs less than the signature method. There will probably be various levels of dishonesty and outright fraud by various independent contractors and subcontractors to get those voter regs. As long as no labels can’t be proven to be behind any of the misleading pitches it’s not likely to cost them anything more than some limited local bad publicity here and there, and with today’s short attention spans it won’t impact anything for them. If they knew who their candidates would be now it could be cheaper to qualify an independent ticket, but it won’t be by the time the ticket is selected, and they do not want to take chances.

  11. The “Doug” post above comes off as though it was written by Paul Frankel. We all know he has posted here and at IPR and other sites under lots of fake names over the years.

  12. I don’t know who it what u are babbling about, much less why. Is “Jerry” Steve?

  13. The person posting as “Doug” appears to have some knowledge of how the petition business works. That is something Paul Frankel would know.

    The junkie may be back to get his political fix.

  14. Is it esoteric knowledge? Why is that profession even in existence at all? Ballot access should be very simple: a party which has a precinct captain who flies its flag in between elections and shows up to marshal his party’s forces at the voting hall on election nights is eligible to gather voters in its corner or section of the room and make speeches to persuade voters to join them before they are counted. People who gather ballot signatures for a living would have to find a more useful profession, but so would many others. Because the entire body of laws would fit in a single printed page to be interpreted in application by responding officers in the field who would also serve as judge, jury, and executioner, you would find lawyers, lobbyists, and legislators among the ranks of those seeking new employment. Perhaps they could find positions with a waste management company, helping to dispose of the corpses of perps who get executed by responding peace officers, which would become a common and unremarkable everyday occurrence.

  15. 1) Gathering petition signatures for candidates or parties ideally should not just be about gathering signatures, it should also be about doing field outreach/spreading the message of the party or candiate.

    2) There’d still be a need for petition circulators even without candidate or party petitions, as there are also ballot initiative, referendum, and recall petitions, as well as non-binding plebiscite petitions. The biggest part of the petition business is ballot initiatives and referendums. There is also work with voter registration drives and GOTV (Get Out The Vote).

    There will be a need to petition the government as long as government exists.

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