Mississippi holds all its elections for state office in the odd years that are one year before presidential election years. State legislators in both houses have 4-year terms, and they are all due in the same year. Therefore, Mississippi only has legislative elections once every four years, and 2007 is such a year.

Filing has already closed for the primaries. The Constitution Party has nine candidates for the legislature, and the Green Party has two candidates for the legislature. This is the largest number of minor party candidates for the Mississippi legislature since 1923, when the Socialist Party had legislative candidates.

The Constitution Party this year also has one statewide candidate in Mississippi. He is Paul Leslie Riley, for Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce.

In Mississippi, although all qualified parties nominate by primary, no primary is actually held if there are no contests. Therefore, the Green and Constitution Parties won’t actually hold a primary, since in no case are two members of these parties running against each other in the primaries of those parties.

On March 2, Arkansas Representative Dan Greenberg (R-Little Rock) introduced two ballot access bills at the request of the Secretary of State.

The first bill, HB 2367, is wholly beneficial. It sets up procedures for independent presidential candidates to get on the ballot. Arkansas currently is the only state with no procedures for independent presidential candidates to get on the ballot. Instead, Arkansas has procedures for “groups” to qualify for president, and for entire new parties. HB 2367 would require an independent presidential candidate to get 1,000 signatures; this is identical to the existing law for “groups” to place a presidential candidate on the ballot.

Arkansas’ failure to have any independent candidate procedure was a problem for Ralph Nader in 2004. He was an independent candidate, but he was forced to form a “group” in Arkansas, just to get on the ballot. His supporters first formed the Populist group, and later decided to call it the Better Life group. Some of their paperwork used one name, and some of their other paperwork used the other name. That almost kept him off the ballot; he was eliminated from the ballot by a lower state court, but the State Supreme Court put him in a 4-3 vote.

The other new bill on March 2 is HB 2353, also by Rep. Greenberg. It sets the new party petition at 2% of the last gubernatorial vote, which would be exactly 16,000 signatures for 2008. This bill is disappointing. Last year the old 3% of the last gubernatorial law was ruled unconstitutional. Observers had expected the Secretary of State to support a new law requiring a flat number of 10,000 signatures, but he has instead gone for 16,000. The bill retains the law requiring the party petition to be completed in 150 days, and fails to set a petition deadline for this petition (the old law has this flaw as well).

It has been three days since the Oklahoma State Court of Appeals upheld the state’s ballot access laws for new and previously unqualified parties, and the daily newspapers in Oklahoma still have not mentioned the decision. One would have thought it was newsworthy, since it did discuss the point that Oklahoma was the only state in November 2004 in which people couldn’t vote for president unless they were willing to vote for either President Bush or Senator Kerry.