Doug Friedline died on November 10, of a heart attack, at the age of 49. He had been been a leading political consultant for anyone who ran for office outside the major parties. He had worked for Ross Perot and had assumed leadership in Jesse Ventura’s campaign. He had also worked for at least one Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, in New Jersey, and had been working for Max Linn (Reform Party candidate for Governor of Florida) this year. Friedline’s home was in Chappaqua, New York, but he died in Treasure Island, Florida. Thanks to Darcy Richardson for this news.

In 2008, an independent presidential candidate in Texas will need 74,108 signatures. But a new party will need 43,939 signatures.

Completion of a new party petition will enable that party to nominate someone for every partisan office in the state. With 254 counties, all using partisan elections, each electing at least six or seven county offices, plus all the state and federal offices, a single new party petition could potentially add several thousand candidates to the November 2008 ballot.

But an independent presidential petition only adds one name to the ballot. Clearly, it is absurd for Texas to require 30,000 more signatures for an independent presidential candidate than for an entire new party. If anyone in Texas reads this, please ask your state legislator for a bill to ease the independent presidential petition. Another foolish aspect of the Texas presidential law is that statewide independent candidates for office other than president need 43,939 signatures in 2008, rather than 74,108. Still another foolish aspect is that independent petitions are due two weeks before the new party petition.

In the opinion of Ballot Access News, a model state ballot access for minor parties would closely resemble the laws in place in Colorado, Delaware and Louisiana. Ballot-qualified status for a minor party should be based on whether it has a reasonable number of registered voters. It should not be based on a party’s vote in the previous election. Colorado and Louisiana define a ballot-qualified minor party to be a group with 1,000 registered voters; Delaware defines it to be a group with registration of one-twentieth of 1% of the state total.

Of course, this model law cannot be applied in the 21 states that do not have registration by party.

The advantage of using registration data, instead of votes cast at a previous election, are: (1) registration data is current, whereas votes in a previous election are not. Sometimes parties that pass the vote test in a previous election cease to exist. California recognized the Natural Law Party in 2004 and 2006, because it had polled 2% in 2002. But the party had ceased to exist in 2004 and 2006, and California wasted money printing up Natural Law Party ballots when no one ran in that party’s primary in either year.

(2) Using a voter registration test, instead of a vote test, gives minor parties the option to skip the statewide races, if they wish, and just concentrate on offices that are easier to win, such as state legislative seats and partisan county and city offices. But when a statewide vote test is used, minor parties are forced to compete in statewide contests even if they may not wish to.

(3) Voter registration tests do not cost much money to administer. By contrast, petitions, as a method to qualify new parties, do force elections officials to waste public money on the petition-checking process. Petition-checking generally costs 10 cents per signature. And if elections officials use the challenge system, and don’t check petitions unless a private group challenges the petition, the results are often unjust. Petitioning parties are least likely to be challenged if those parties have so little appeal that they don’t threaten either major party, and most likely to be challenged if they have real voter support.

(4) Petitioning is inherently flawed. There are always illegible signatures. There are always signatures from people who have moved and re-registered so recently that the voter registration records are not up to date. Disputes about the number of valid signatures are costly to resolve.