Four states hold partisan primary elections next week: Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

In Kentucky, the only statewide race is the U.S. Senate race. Attention is focused on the Republican primary. In a five-person race, Rand Paul has a 16-point lead over Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson. See poll details at this link. Paul, the son of Congressman Ron Paul, is very aware of unfair ballot access laws for minor party and independent candidates. In 1988, he worked in his father’s Libertarian Party campaign for President.

Ron Paul was treated badly by several states in 1988, notably Missouri, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Indiana. In Missouri the petition was deemed valid but Paul still didn’t appear on the ballot, because the nominees for presidential elector were turned in a few days after the deadline (that same year, Democrats and Republicans both made an identical error in Indiana, but Indiana excused the error).

The number of signatures was excessive for Paul that year in both Indiana (30,950) and North Carolina (44,535). Indiana even refused to permit write-ins, although Paul sued Indiana to overturn the write-in ban and won the case in 1990. In West Virginia, which required 7,358, petitioners were forced to tell everyone they approached, “If you sign my petition, you can’t vote in the primary” and state employees sometimes trailed petitioners to listen to what they said.

If Rand Paul is elected to the Senate, he will be the first candidate elected to a full term in the Senate who cares about ballot access, and is knowledgeable about it, in many decades. Although ballot access reform bills have been introduced into the U.S. House in ten different sessions of Congress during the past 25 years, no such bill has ever been introduced in the U.S. Senate.