The Greensboro, North Carolina News & Record has this editorial in its March 18 edition. The editorial expresses disappointment with the recent North Carolina Supreme Court decision upholding the state’s ballot access law for minor parties. It hopes that the legislature will reform the law. North Carolina requires 85,379 signatures for a new party, or a statewide independent candidate, to get on the 2012 ballot. Also, parties cannot get on the ballot in any part of the state, unless they get on statewide. And, North Carolina is one of the few states that won’t let voters register into unqualified parties.

It is notable that many of the state’s leading newspapers have a better grasp of the facts than the majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court did. The majority said the 85,379 requirement is necessary to prevent “frivolous and fraudulent” candidates from getting on the ballot. But there were no such parties on the North Carolina ballot during the years 1929 through 1981, when the state only required 10,000 signatures for minor parties. The requirement was not raised in order to stop ballot clutter, as the record in the lawsuit showed. The requirement was raised because legislators were upset that the Socialist Workers Party had qualified for the ballot in 1980, the first time that a Marxist political party had ever appeared on a government-printed ballot in North Carolina. The Supreme Court ignored an overwhelming amount of evidence in the case.