December 2024 Ballot Access News Print Edition

Posted on by December 28, 2024
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DEMOCRATIC HOSTILITY TO ROBERT KENNEDY, JR. MAY HAVE COST KAMALA HARRIS THE PRESIDENCY

The popular vote in the November 5, 2024 presidential election was very close.  Donald Trump received 49.86% and Kamala Harris received 48.24%.  The margin between the two major candidates, 1.62%, is the smallest since 2000.

The result may have been reversed if Democratic officials had not made a effort to injure the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. candidacy, behavior which motivated him to quit the race.  Between Kennedy’s announcement in October 2023 that he would be an independent candidate and August 1, 2024, his poll numbers varied from 20% to 8%, according to The Hill’s compilation of presidential polls.  Kennedy declined in the polls during August, but he was still at 7% in the Pew Research Center poll released August 14.  Meanwhile, Kamala Harris led in 29 of the 37 polls released in August (see the Wikipedia page “Opinion polling for the 2024 United States presidential election”).  But then, on August 23, Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.  The hostility toward him from Democratic Party leaders had been huge:

  1. Democrats had attacked Kennedy’s ballot access in Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Texas.
  2. Democrats worked with CNN to set debate criteria for the June 27 debate that made it impossible for Kennedy to qualify for the debate. They did this by saying his ballot access had to be confirmed in states with at least a majority of the electoral college votes by June 20. This ignored the fact that states simply do not check signatures that early.

The debate rules should have allowed secondary evidence that would have predicted with a high degree of certainty that Kennedy would be on the ballot.  The rule was also discriminatory because at the time there was no certainty that the Democratic Party nominee would be President Joe Biden.

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Texas Trial Over Filing Fees for Candidates Who Seek a Convention Nomination is Postponed

Posted on by December 28, 2024
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Texas has a fairly new law, requiring candidates who seek the nomination of a party that uses conventions to pay a large filing fee. If the fee is not paid before the convention begins, the convention cannot consider nominating him or her. The Libertarian Party of Texas has a federal case pending against this law. Bilyeu v Esparza, w.d., 1:21cv-1089. On December 20, the U.S. District Court Judge postponed the trial from September 8, 2025 to November 3, 2025.

Restrictive New Jersey Ballot Access Bill Might Get Senate Vote on January 14

Posted on by December 27, 2024
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The New Jersey Senate is in recess, but it returns on Tuesday, January 14. It is possible the bill making ballot access more restrictive will get a vote that day. The Green, Libertarian, and Moderate Parties are working to defeat the bill, which has already passed the Senate policy committee, and the Assembly. The identical bills are SB 3994, and AB 5117.

Although the petition requirements would not be unconstitutionally severe if the bills pass, the New Jersey definition of a qualified party might be. It’s already difficult enough to imagine a minor party polling 10% of the entire Assembly vote for its Assembly nominees, and if a group tried, logically it should run 80 candidates. But the task of recruiting and petitioning for 80 candidates would be even more severe if each candidate, or pair of candidates, needs 250 signatures instead of 100, as the bills would establish.

The minor parties also have some leverage because they are in a position to sue over New Jersey’s discriminatory ballot format, in which (in most counties) the Republican Party and the Democratic Party each get a party column of their own, but every other candidate is squeezed into a column headed by “Nomination by Petition”. That prevents some voters from even noticing the names of the minor party candidates. This year a federal court enjoined that type of ballot format for primary election ballots, and the legislature is working to reform primary ballot format. But no bill has been introduced to reform ballot format for the general election.

Republican Candidates for U.S. House Received 51.27% of the Two-Party Vote But Only Won 50.57% of the Seats

Posted on by December 27, 2024
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Last month, the Republican share of the two-party vote for U.S. House was 51.27% in the entire nation. Yet Republicans only won 50.57% of the seats (Republicans won 220 seats and Democrats won 215). Although it is common for commentators to assume that most of the U.S. House gerrymandering is the fault of Republican-majority state legislatures, the final results for 2024 suggest that this is not true.

The Brennan Center issued a press release on December 27, blaming gerrymandering for costing Democrats a majority of the seats this year. But the press release does not mention the national vote totals for U.S. House.

note: BAN calculates the share of the popular vote without including votes for the Working Families Party and Conservative Party when those parties cross-nominate Democratic and Republican nominees. Other sources that calculate the national vote for U.S. House do include such votes, so there might appear to be a slight discrepancy in the national totals. It barely makes a difference, because the Conservative and Working Families nominations tend to cancel each other out.