On December 16, the Maine Libertarian Party filed notice with the Secretary of State, letting her know that the party desires to let independent voters sign petitions to get Libertarians on the Libertarian primary ballot. The 2025 legislature passed a bill letting parties make this decision for themselves.
Maine requires a large number of signatures for candidates to get on primary ballots. For example, 2,000 signatures are needed for statewide office, regardless of how many registered voters the party has. But because 32% of Maine voters are registered independents, letting them sign will make it easier for Libertarians to get on the party’s primary ballot. It’s still a tough job, but the job would be much harder if only the 7,000 registered Libertarians could sign.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/12/19/trump-order-two-federal-holidays-christmas-eve/87847137007/?tbref=hp
TYRANT TRUMP – MORE HOLIDAYS FOR OVERPAID USA GOVT HACKS ???
HOLIDAYS NAMED AFTER TYRANT TRUMP ???
This make sense to do since it makes the primary petition signature gathering easier.
Do political parties that allow registered non-partisans in Maine sign their primary ballot access petitions have to allow non-partisan registered voters to vote in their primary elections?
All Maine parties automatically let independent voters vote in their primaries. There is no party choice in that variable.
The AZ 666 SPAMBOT still needs to answer the IFO QUESTIONS and Richard Winger still needs to stop enabling the murderous left’s assassination politics by allowing those questions to be posted again if he keeps allowing the spambot to keep spamming its nonsense about Trump being a “tyrant.”
Unfortunately, neither of those will happen.
Winger’s stated reason for deleting those logical questions is that it’s “unpleasant” to mention the things actual tyrants do, including having people’s organs harvested against their will while they are alive without anaesthesia.
If Trump was actually a tyrant, Winger would have long since had to remove comments about Trump being a “tyrant” or had his site shut down (and probably gone to jail and or been executed to boot).
Tyrants deserve to be assassinated, and frequently do get assassinated. There have already been at least two attempts to assassinate Liberator, Peacemaker, Savior Trump. Allowing the constant bot spam about Trump being a tyrant and deleting the questions which show how ridiculous that lie is amounts to encouraging more such assassination attempts.
Recognized parties should have the right to allow independents, and even members of other parties, to sign their petitions, if they so choose. I’s their nomination to make.
They should not need any petitions. Those who show up to vote should form the parties in the election hall. Showing up = party access.
@Andy,
In Maine, it is pointless to register as a Libertarian or Green since they will practically never have a contested primary. The only real reason would be to qualify a new party. You might remember when No Labels was getting Mainers to join the party, and it was claimed that circulators were tricking voters to switch.
The Green party does OK because in Maine it is the Green Independent Party. American Independent voters from California think that Green Independent and American Independent party are the same. “independent” voters in Maine are termed ‘Unenrolled’ which might sound like you are Unregistered.
While Maine does permit Unenrolled voters to vote in any primary, it requires affiliated voters to change their registration 15 days before the primary in order to vote in a primary. If you heard on the news of the impending deadline, you might think that you had to switch from Unenrolled. The Democrats and Republicans are not going to publicize that fact. A relative large share of Unenrolled voters were dragooned down at the DMV to be registered and are unlikely to vote.
There are so few Libertarian voters, that in some House districts it would be impossible to gather enough signatures, even if every one of the Libertarians signed the petition. Even if you went to the address on the voter roll, you would find many had moved, or died, or changed political beliefs, or worked the graveyard shift and are angry that you knocked on their door. Maine does permit candidate petitioners to collect party affiliation change forms, so long as they turn those forms in before they turn in the candidate petition. There was one Libertarian candidate who circulated his own petition and convinced enough Unenrolled voters to become Libertarians to qualify – except he also convinced a Republican to switch and he used his birth date rather than the signing date. Fortunately he had taken a picture of every form at the time of signing, and he could show when the signing had occurred from the metadata. The challenger suggested that a hacker could have changed the metadata.
So with the new law, Libertarian candidates could ask unenrolled voters to sign their candidate petition. Maine House districts are quite small and is possible to canvass door to door. A candidate could easily convince enough unenrolled voters to let him/her be on the ballot.
Sounds like a highly productive use of time, money, volunteer resources, etc, right? I bet nobody here can think of anything better those can be used for?