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.

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.

On August 10, Michigan state rep. Leon Drolet introduced HB5082, which would relax the law concerning the deadline for a qualified minor party to certify the name of its presidential and vice-presidential candidates to the Secretary of State. Current law requires that the names be certified within one business day after the national convention ends. The bill would say that the parties must certify the names no later than 60 days before the general election. Last year, the Libertarian Party failed to certify the names of its national ticket to the Secretary of State within one day after the close of the convention, because the state party officers were driving home to Michigan from Atlanta, Georgia, a trip which took longer than one day. However, the Michigan Secretary of State overlooked this technical transgression.