A few weeks ago, the Arkansas Attorney General issued an opinion denying that it is legal for parties to circulate a petition during odd years. However, the Secretary of State’s legal advisor says that the Secretary of State does not agree with that opinion, and will not follow it.
On August 22, Illinois House Bill 1968 was signed into law. It lowers the number of signatures to get on the ballot for Mayor of Chicago from 25,000 signatures to 12,500 signatures. This is the easiest petition requirement (for candidates who are not Democrats or Republicans) to run for that office since 1931. The requirement between 1931 and 1979 was 5% of the last vote cast (usually about 50,000), and in 1979 it had been lowered to 25,000.
On August 22, the North Carolina State Board of Elections removed the Libertarian Party from the ballot. In response, the party plans to bring a lawsuit, charging that the state’s ballot access laws violate the State Constitution. Article I, sec. 10, of the North Carolina Constitution says “All elections shall be free”.
Current ballot access law requires a party to obtain 69,734 signatures, unless it polled 10% for president or governor at the last election. Yet U.S. history shows that states that require as few as 5,000 signatures never have a crowded ballot, where “crowded ballot” is defined as a ballot with more than 8 parties or candidates. North Carolina only required 10,000 signatures for a new party to get on the ballot before 1981.
Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project, will be the Constitution Party’s candidate for congress in the 48th California district on October 4 (in California, the Constitution Party is called the American Independent Party). The 48th district is in southern Orange County. Gilchrist’s announcement on August 20 received a great deal of publicity, since he is well-known. If no one gets 50% of the vote on October 4, the top vote-getter from each party will run in a run-off on December 6.
17 candidates will be on the October ballot: 10 Republicans, 4 Democrats, Gilchrist, Libertarian Bruce Cohen, and Green Bea Tiritilli. Several other candidates failed to turn in enough signatures.
On Saturday, August 13, the North Carolina Senate passed HB1115. However, before passing it, they deleted the modest ballot access improvement that had been contained in that bill.
HB1115 is a very large bill, containing all the election law changes desired by the State Board of Elections. The State Board of Elections wrote into the bill a provision lowering the number of signatures for a statewide independent, from 2% of the registered voters, to 2% of the last gubernatorial vote. The State Board of Elections did this because last year a federal court struck down the existing requirement, and the State Board wants to eliminate laws that have been declared unconstitutional.
Although the House had passed HB1115 in the form requested by the State Board of Elections, the Senate deleted this part of the bill.
In the meantime, H88, which lowers both types of petition to one-half of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, has not made any headway recently, although it is still alive.
The Senate’s action on August 13 can be interpreted in two ways. The optimistic way is: if the Senate is actually more sympathetic to more comprehensive ballot access liberalization, it might have deleted the State Board’s provision to signal its attitude that it prefers the H88 approach. The pessimistic way is: if the Senate is vehemently against any ballot access reform at all, it might have deleted the State Board’s provision just to show its displeasure with last year’s court decision. Or perhaps the Senate still doesn’t know what to do about ballot access, so it is just postponing doing anything until next year.
