1. 50% more signatures might not be enough of a buffer after what the unDemocrats tried to pull against the North Carolina Greens last year. Hope the MO Greens go for more than that.

2. INDIVIDUALS ARE NOMINATED/ELECTED — NOT PARTIES

3. Not necessarily true, and when true, unfortunate. Parties should be nominated/elected, not individuals.

4. Joshua: depends more on quality of signatures gathered than anything, although verification methods play a role.

5. PARTIES = FICTION

   LIKE FICTION GOVERNMENTS / CORPORATIONS / ETC. — ALL ***ARTIFICIAL*** PERSONS

   TOO MANY LAW 00001 NEW AGE MORONS TO COUNT.

   NON-MORONS — SEE NOW OLDE BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES 1760S-

   JUST BEFORE 1775-1784 AM REV WAR

6. Wrong. Voting for a party is voting for an ideology or idea. Voting for individuals is like grade school popularity contest elections, except for people the vast majority of voters never even actually met and only know a heavily manipulated version of (for the better known candidates) or meaningless names to the vast majority of voters (for the less known ones). A minor party has a much better chance to communicate at least something about what it stands for to a nontrivial percentage of voters through cumulative efforts over time than an individual who isn’t well known, well financed, and well connected.

7. @RWP,

   The Texas Constitution says that legislators are to be chosen by the voters. There are similar provisions in other constitutions.

   Quit pretending that ballot access barriers are protecting voters. RWP may be a benevolent dictator for the ignorant citizens who he/she characterizes as children or childlike. But he/she is still a dictator.

8. What in the world are you talking about? I’m not a dictator and I don’t support every provision of every constitution. I’m for useful ballot labels, informed voters, and voting for ideas. How you get from that to dictatorship and support for ballot access barriers? Remains a mystery to me.

9. Please show where I said or even remotely implied that voters are children or child-like. On the contrary, they are busy adults with many other responsibilities and interests besides obsessively researching every candidate for every office. Granted, there are a few hobbyists who choose to spend their time that way, but it’s not going to be most people, or anywhere close to it. Pretending this will change just because you omit party ballot labels is at best naive and at worst disingenuous.

   What happens instead is that only the parties and candidates with enough resources to talk to a substantial share of voters are the only ones noticed, and others become meaningless names cluttering the ballot for the vast majority of voters. Candidates and parties with fewer resources than others rely more on the party ballot labels to communicate anything at all about who their candidates are and what they stand for to voters who are not political nerds. Therefore, removing those labels concentrates power more in the hands of the parties, factions, and candidates with significant resources from the getgo.

   This isn’t just speculation. It already happens. Tennessee is an example. Candidates for at least some offices get on the ballot easily but get no party label. There are always lots of them, and the ones who are not well known routinely get ignored. Their campaign builds nothing for the next cycle, and reaches far too few eyes and ears to make any real dent in anything at all.

10. None of that would be a problem with my proposals. Going in their direction incrementally would make the problems dissipate gradually.

11. https://www.missourigreenparty.org

    SEE THE CARTOON – BREAKING THE D/R BALLS AND CHAINS

12. Meh. They want the same chains, only painted green.

13. @RWP,

    You said that voting for individuals was like grade-school elections.

    The purpose of a constitution is to define how government is constituted. The most fundamental body in a republic is the Legislature. In all states they are elected as individuals.

    Erecting ballot access barriers interferes with this.

    Once you give political parties access to the ballot, they seek to seek to restrict others. They will say that others are “unqualified” or will confuse your “busy adults”, or are “frivolous”, or will “clutter” the ballot.

    Political organizations can always distribute slate cards with their recommendations.

14. I understand the purpose of constitutions. I also think they get some things wrong. As far as methods of voting and access to voting, Max is as he admits extreme, but it sounds a lot better than what we have now and I’d rather see incremental change towards that. Make elections much more local and by party, and get government out of things other than national defense and criminal law enforcement. Standing count in person elections. Precinct level voting access. All those things sound good to me.

    Even if you continue to print or electronically “print” ballots, there is no reason to limit number of parties necessarily. There have been elections in the US and elsewhere with hundreds of choices for the same office. The same population voting in elections, give or take roughly, manages to navigate supermarkets and other such establishments and their digital age equivalents.

    Political organizations can circulate slate cards, but some are much better able to do so than others. Additionally, simply doing that is not enough to attract much attention or candidate/issue identification in the minds of any significant slice of voters. Most voters have jobs, families, and other concerns besides elections and political crap. It takes a lot of repetitive ads in multiple formats to get enough people’s attention. Organizations that are several orders of magnitude below parity with the largest one can’t rise above background noise level, particularly in electorates of millions or even tens or hundreds of millions, covering vast land areas to boot.

    So, let’s not pretend that simply giving easy ballot access gives candidates an even playing field. It just clutters the ballot with a bunch of names few people can associate with anything whatsoever, much less correctly. And that’s if the ballot access is actually easy. I think you either vastly overestimate how many people will take time out of their day to go stand in a courthouse for some candidate, particularly one running for an office few people know the importance of and/or not seen as having much chance to win, or you correctly surmise that this process will actually greatly reduce the available candidate choices, particularly at the lower rungs of power which are the most common stepping stones to higher office later.

    Either way, smaller parties and candidates who are relatively less well known, well funded, and well connected depend on the ballot label much more than the more dominant or establishment ones. With it, they can gradually build issue/candidate identification over multiple cycles. Without it, they don’t get minimal traction to sustain anything, and as a result the choice of ideas – especially ones any significant slice of the electorate is aware of – is reduced, primarily to the already established and predominant ones.

    Contrary to your predictions, there are countries where people vote by party rather than by candidate, or the party listing is given more significance than in the US. Those countries often – I think more often than not – have more parties represented at higher levels of office than the US.

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