Washington state’s ballot access improvement bill, HB 1534, passed the House on February 14. It has a hearing in the State Senate Elections Committee on February 22 (Friday) at 3:30 pm.

The bill does not make all the improvements that had previously been suggested. It still requires each nominee of an unqualified party to submit his or her own separate petition.

However, it improves current law: (1) it lowers the petition requirement for unqualified party candidates for US House, and for independent candidates for US House, from 1,000 signatures to 250 signatures; (2) it expands the petitioning period; (3) for qualified parties (those which are entitled to nominate by primary), the number of votes needed in the open primary for the person to be considered nominated is lowered from 1%, to 1,000 votes for statewide office, 250 votes for US House, and 100 votes for other partisan office. Although there shouldn’t be any minimum vote requirement, at least these minimums are much lower than the old requirement.

Ralph Nader will be one of the guests on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning interview show, on February 24. Thanks to Jack Ross and Thomas Jones for this news. Here is a link to a story about the appearance, from the Associated Press.

The AP story is incorrect to say that Nader got .3% of the vote in November 2004. He received .4% (more precisely, .381%). The article is also deficient to fail to note that Nader did not injure John Kerry in 2004. Both election returns analysis, and poll data from late October 2004, showed that Nader voters were somewhat more likely to vote for George Bush than John Kerry, if they couldn’t vote for Nader. See the Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, page one, for the story about the poll data. See the print version of Ballot Access News, January 1, 2005, for the election returns evidence. Nader’s best state in 2004 was Alaska, and his best county in the U.S. in 2004 was Grand County, Utah. In three-fourths of the states in which Nader was on the ballot in 2004, his best county in that particular state was more in favor of Bush than that state as a whole.