Almost 27% of the Missouri voters voted for either the Libertarian, or the Constitution Party, nominee for State Auditor. No Democrat was running. Auditor was the only statewide race on the ballot. Here is a link to the Secretary of State’s election returns web page.
The Green Party and the Libertarian Party each have regained qualified status in Wisconsin, based on their showings for Treasurer. See this story. Parties need 1% for any statewide race for recognition. The only statewide Constitution Party nominee, Andrew Zuelke, also running for Treasurer, has 1% of the vote, according to the story. There are no election returns on the state’s elections office web page, so it will be some time before it is known if the Constitution Party nominee polled enough votes. The newspaper story rounds off, of course, so we can’t know if Zuelke polled slightly under, or slightly over, 1%.
The Libertarian Party and the Green Party went off the Wisconsin ballot after the 2010 election, when neither received as much as 1% for any statewide race.
Fairvote has this summary of how voters in each state voted, on statewide ballot measures affecting election law.
On November 4, 2014, the Hawaii Libertarian Party’s nominees for State Senate, together, polled 7,862. The party had five nominees, and there were eleven districts voting for State Senate. The law passed in 1999 provided for the first time that a party could meet the vote test if it did well enough for its legislative candidates, and requires all of the party’s nominees for State Senate to poll 4% of the total cast for State Senate. That means the party needed 5,572 votes in 2014 for its State Senate candidates, a requirement which it exceeded.
The law also permits a party to pass the vote test if it polled 10% for a statewide office, or 4% of all the votes cast for State House, or 2% of all the votes cast for both houses of the legislature combined. A 1980 Attorney General ruling says that blank votes should be excluded from the denominator, when these percentages are calculated.
The Independent Party polled over 10% for Governor, so it also passed the vote test. The Green Party was not required to meet the vote test because the law also gives automatic status, for ten years, to any party that appeared on the ballot in at least three elections in a row. The Green Party is currently in its ten years of automatic status. Here is a link to the State Elections Office web page, showing 2014 election returns.
The Minnesota Independence Party, which has been ballot-qualified starting in 1994, appears likely to lose its qualified status. Here is a link to the Minnesota Secretary of State’s web page, showing election returns. The party needed to poll 5% for one of the statewide races this year, because it did not poll as much as 5% for any statewide race in 2012. Its strongest statewide nominee, Bob Helland for Secretary of State, is at 4.91%.
No other minor party polled 5% for any statewide race either. Assuming the Independence Party goes off the ballot, it may be possible to persuade the Minnesota legislature to lower the vote test. The median vote test for the 50 states is 2%, and Minnesota has a long tradition of tolerance toward minor parties. Even though Minnesota requires 5% for qualified party status for ballot access purposes, for purposes of obtaining public funding, the vote test is 1%.
