New York Times Carries a Story on Ballot Access for New Parties

The New York Times published a story on its website on July 7, “It’s Hard to Create a Third Party, Even for Elon Musk”.  Unlike any other news stories on this subject, it mentions the worst ballot access law in the United States.  It says, when discussing ballot access laws for Congress, “The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district.  This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943.”

The story is probably behind a pay wall for most readers, but here is the link.

President Trump Says New Political Parties are Bad for Society

On June 6, President Trump wrote, “The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total Disruption and Chaos, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats.”

The ability of the people to form new parties is the essence of a free society.  In 1990 the United States signed the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting, part of the Helsinki Accords process.  We promised to “respect the right of individuals and groups to establish, in full freedom, their own political parties or other political organizations and provide such political parties and organizations with the necessary legal guarantees to enable them to compete with each other on a basis of equal treatment before the law.”

Elon Musk Says His America Party “Has been Formed”

On July 5, Elon Musk said that the America Party “has been formed.”  UPDATE:  here is the party website, which has a platform.

New York state election code 2-124 says, “The name of a party shall be in the English language, and shall not include the words “American”, “United States”, “National”, “New York State”, “Empire State”, Independence”, “Independent”, or any abbreviation thereof.”  It is not clear if this law would ban the word “America”.  The law is highly authoritarian and no other state has such a list of prohibited words.