Five minor parties in Michigan have formed the Michigan Third Parties Coalition, which has a website at www.mithirdparties.org. Three of the parties in the coalition are already on the ballot, and two are not. The five parties are Constitution, Green, Libertarian, (those three parties are on the ballot), and Reform and Socialist (those two parties are not on the ballot).

The Coalition wants ballot access improvements, and will lobby to reduce the number of signatures needed for a party to get on the ballot, and also for the ability of a party to get on the ballot in just part of the state, if it can’t get on statewide.

The Coalition also wants more inclusive campaign debates.

Michigan has one of the easiest laws in the nation for a party to REMAIN on the ballot, once it has qualified. Of course, that is no comfort to the parties that aren’t on the ballot. The petition for a party to GET on the ballot is more difficult than the average state.

The Reform Party was qualified in 2004, but it was unable to place any nominees on the ballot because two separate groups (each claiming to be the legitimate party officers) submitted different slates of nominees, and the Michigan Secretary of State refused to decide the issue. Because the party had no candidates on the ballot in 2004, it was unable to poll any votes for any nominees, and so was disqualified.

One flaw in Michigan law that the Coalition has not mentioned so far is that Michigan is one of the few states that refuses to let qualified parties change their name. This injures the Constitution Party, because Michigan still insists on calling it the “U.S. Taxpayers Party”, which was that party’s name until 1999, when it was changed to “Constitution Party” by the national convention.

Law Professor James A. Gardner has recently authored “Deliberation or Tabulation? The Self-Undermining Constitutional Architecture of Election Campaigns.” It is in the Buffalo Law Review, April 2007, vol. 54, no. 5. It points out that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said that election campaigns are times when parties and candidates try to persuade the electorate to a particular point of view. Yet, many U.S. Supreme Court election law decisions legitimize laws that make it impossible or very difficult for new and relatively unpopular ideas to be heard.

There are at least a dozen scholarly articles in law journals, cricitizing the U.S. Supreme Court for being to eager to uphold restrictive ballot access laws. As far as is known, there are no scholarly articles that praise the U.S. Supreme Court record on ballot access.