The number of signatures independent candidates need in Arizona this year is 3% of the registered voters who are not members of a qualified party (as of the March 1, 2016 tally). For 2016, statewide independents need 35,514 valid signatures. Arizona requires 20,119 valid signatures for a new party to get on the ballot. The Arizona law is irrational because it requires more signatures for a single independent candidate than for an entire new party. Yet a new party potentially adds many more candidates to the November ballot than a single independent candidate petition.

On March 28, the Secretary of State posted the March 1 registration data. Here is a link to the new data. Major party registration grew, for both major parties. Minor party and independent registration declined. The link gives the preceding tallies for purposes of comparison. The growth in Democratic and Republican registration is certainly because those parties held closed presidential primaries on March 22, giving people an incentive to join those parties.

On March 24, the government of New Hampshire filed this brief with the First Circuit, in defense of its 2014 law making it illegal for a group to circulate the party petition in an odd year. The case was filed by the Libertarian Party, which is the only party that has ever managed to complete a New Hampshire party petition in the 19 years the law has existed. The party managed to complete that petition, which requires signatures equal to 3% of the last gubernatorial vote, in 2000 and 2012. Both times, the party started in the middle of the odd year before the election, and didn’t finish it until the middle of the election year. In response to the party’s 2012 success, the legislature changed the law to eliminate odd-year petitioning.

The brief spends a great deal of time attacking the New Hampshire Libertarian Party for being weak and small. The brief says the party has fewer than 150 registered members. This claim is laughable. New Hampshire is one of only two states (that has registration by party) that will not tally the number of registered Libertarians (the other state is Rhode Island). No one knows how many people wrote in the word “Libertarian” on the voter registration forms, on the blank line. The state also attacks the party for having few people attend its state convention, without acknowledging that a leading reason the party is weak is that the New Hampshire ballot access laws are so stringent. New Hampshire is one of only five states in November 2014 that had a ballot monopoly on all the statewide offices for the Democratic and Republican Parties.

The state claims its interest in the new law is to avoid “ballot clutter.” This is also laughable, because New Hampshire has the nation’s most “cluttered” presidential primary ballots, every year. The Secretary of State importunes candidates to file in the New Hampshire primary. This year there were 28 Democrats on the Democratic presidential primary ballot, and 30 Republicans on the Republican ballot.

New York Magazine has this interesting story by Ed Kilgore, who explains that nowadays, major party presidential conventions are planned weeks beforehand, by the candidate expected to be the presidential nominee. Important decisions about the platform, the rules, who speaks when, are normally under the control of the expected nominee and his or her campaign. But there may not be any such person during the weeks before the Republican convention.