The Hill has this commentary by J. T. Young, a former executive branch officer under the George W. Bush presidency. Young says if the voters who voted for Jo Jorgensen had voted for Donald Trump in 2020, Trump would have been re-elected.
Of course, these analyses are not fully meaningful, because no one knows how voters who vote for third party candidates would have voted if that third party had not entered a nominee.
In Texas, smaller qualified parties nominate by convention; larger ones by primary. For over 100 years, the only Texas candidates who had to pay a filing fee were candidates running in a primary. On April 29, the Texas Senate unanimously passed SB 2093, which says no one can be considered for a convention nomination unless he or she has paid a filing fee to the government. It passed unanimously. Here is the text.
The 2019 legislature also passed a filing fee bill for convention nominations, but it was worded so badly that it was not enforced in 2020.
SB 2093 originally said the filing fee should be payable to the political party, but it was amended to direct the fee to the government.
The behavior of the Texas Senate stands in stark contrast to the South Carolina legislature. South Carolina has always had the same rules for filing fees that Texas has had. Only primary candidates pay filing fees. A bill to impose filing fees on South Carolina convention parties failed to pass in this year’s session of the South Carolina legislature.
The logic for requiring convention party candidates to pay filing fees is faulty. The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that filing fees are unconstitutional, unless they are needed for the compelling need to keep ballots from being too crowded. But convention parties don’t have ballots to be crowded. Thanks to Jim Riley for the news about the Texas bill.
On April 30, Georgia filed this response in Cowen v Raffensperger, 1:17cv-4660. This is the case in which the Libertarian Party had challenged the number of signatures for U.S. House, for all candidates who are not the nominees of parties that polled 20% of the vote for president in the entire nation in the last election, or 20% for Governor of Georgia. On March 29 the U.S. District Court had struck down the 5% petition for U.S. House. The judge had then asked both sides for suggestions as to what the new requirements should be, until the legislature amends the law.
The plaintiffs had proposed 500 signatures, or payment of the filing fee, which is very high. In his April 30 response, the Secretary of State says that 500 is “astoundingly low” and “has never been tried.” This is not true. Before 1943, Georgia let independent candidates for U.S. House, and the nominees of unqualified parties, on the ballot with zero signatures and no filing fee, and the state never had a crowded ballot for U.S. House. In fact it never had a U.S. House election in the entire history of government-printed ballots with more than four candidates on the ballot. Georgia has only had government-printed ballots since 1922.
The statement is also false if it is meant to include other states. States that require 500 or fewer signatures for independent candidates for U.S. House are California (40), Florida (zero), Hawaii (25), Idaho (500), Kentucky (400), Louisiana (zero), Mississippi (200), Nevada (100), New Jersey (100), Oklahoma (zero), Rhode Island (500), Tennessee (25), Texas (500), Vermont (250) and Washington (zero).
New York Comgressmember Jamaal Bowman was chosen by the Working Families Party to deliver the WFP response to the state of the nation speech of President Biden. Here is a link to his 12-minute speech. Bowman is a Democrat but the WFP also nominates him.
On April 29, the California Assembly Elections Committee passed AB 446 unanimously. It reduces the petition to recognize a new or previously unqualified party from 10% of the last gubernatorial vote, to 3%. While this sounds like a huge improvement, the procedure to create a new party by petition is almost never used, because there is an alternate procedure (to persuade voters equal to .33% of the registration to register into the party).
If a new party wants to qualify for 2022 by using the petition method, and this bill is signed into law, the requirement would be 373,928 signatures, due in January 2022. Such a petition can begin to circulate at any time. In the entire history of ballot access laws in the United States, there is no instance when a party overcame a requirement greater than 275,970 signatures, except for the Americans Elect petition in 2011 in California, which overcame a requirement of 1,030,040. That drive was funded by Peter Ackerman, a multi-millionaire.
AB 446 also somewhat eases the procedure for a new party to qualify by obtaining registrations. It allows a group to carry out a registration drive using a party name that another past party had also used. Thus, if someone wanted to qualify a party named “Reform Party” in California in the future, it could do so, notwithstanding that the Reform Party under previous officers had existed 1995-2002.
