New Hampshire HB 1188, which lowers the number of signatures for candidates to get on the November ballot, has been tabled in the House, even though it had passed the Election Law Committee on February 16. New Hampshire activists are trying to learn what happened to the bill.
The New Hampshire legislature has never made ballot access easier. Every time the laws are changed in New Hampshire, the change is in the direction of greater exclusion. New Hampshire is also one of only three states that has never had a ballot access law declared unconstitutional.
Who are the other two?
OKlahoma ????????????
The other two are Mississippi and Montana. However, it is extremely likely that the Montana March deadline for non-presidential independent candidates will be invalidated in federal court soon.
Mississippi has such easy ballot access requirements, no one has ever filed a lawsuit to overturn any of them.
Oklahoma’s failure to have any procedure for independent presidential candidates was declared unconstitutional in 1976 by the State Supreme Court. Oklahoma’s law that said petitions to create a new party must be completed in 3 months was struck down in 1984 in U.S. District Court. Oklahoma also lost a parallel case (not a ballot access case) that made it impossible for anyone to register as a member of an unqualified political party. However, the legislature then amended the law on registration to make the victory almost meaningless. Voters can only register into an unqualified party if that unqualified party was qualified during the preceding 4 years. Since there are no such parties, Oklahoma voters still can’t register into any unqualified party just now.