On November 2, California elections officials completed their random sample check of the Americans Elect petition to be a qualified party. Americans Elect had submitted 1,621,318 signatures to meet a requirement of 1,030,040 valid signatures. The random sample shows that the petition has a 69.55% validity rate, and that the petition has 1,127,634 valid signatures.

However, California Election code section 9031(a) says that when a statewide initiative petition random sample shows that the number of valid signatures is less than 110% of the legal requirement, then the elections officials can’t use the results of the random sample, and must check every signature. The process of checking every signature will be expensive for elections officials. The job must be done in six weeks, starting today. The Secretary of State applies the initiative random sample rules to petitions to qualify new parties.

Americans Elect is free to submit more signatures, although it almost certainly doesn’t feel the need to do so. A statistician would say that any petition as large as this one, with a random sample validity of 109.5% of the requirement, is overwhelmingly likely to be valid.

This instance shows that excessively difficult ballot access is bad for election administrators and taxpayers, as well as bad for parties and candidates.

This New York Daily News story says that it is possible New York in 2012 will end up with an April presidential primary, an August congressional primary, and a September primary for state and local office. Each primary would cost taxpayers $50 million to administer.

Even though the Ohio Secretary of State issued a directive late on November 1, putting the Americans Elect, Constitution, Green, Libertarian and Socialist Parties on the 2012 ballot, and even though that directive is on the Secretary of State’s web page, so far the mainstream media in Ohio have run no stories about this news. Here is the link on the Secretary of State’s web page to the directive.