The print edition of Ballot Access News for March 1, 2023, will not be mailed out until March 1, Wednesday. There are three important legislative hearings on ballot access on Tuesday, February 28, and it seems desirable to be able to include news about those three hearings in that issue.
The three hearings are in New Hampshire, Arkansas (both for bills that help ballot access), and Minnesota (for a bill that injures it).
On February 28, Tuesday, Minnesota State Senator Jim Carlson will present his SF 1827, the bill to stiffen the definition of a qualified party from a group that got 5% of the vote for a statewide office in either of the last two elections, to 10%.
Already the definition is too difficult. The only states with 10% vote tests are Virginia and New Jersey (and one state, Alabama, has an even higher vote test, 20%). The median vote test of the 50 states is 2% (although some states don’t have vote tests, and instead use registration data, or level of organization).
Senator Carlson will probably say that the Legal Marijuana Now Party, and the Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party, should not have been given qualified status. Because Minnesota forces all qualified parties to nominate by primary, and because Minnesota has an open primary, there have been instances when insincere candidates filed on the primaries of the marijuana parties, just because they wanted to injure the Democratic nominee. But a solution to that is for Minnesota to let small qualified parties nominate by convention, so that party leaders could avoid having insincere nominees. Neighbors of Minnesota that do that are Michigan and South Dakota.
The hearing is at 3 p.m. There will be a press conference before the hearing, involving activists from the Independence, Libertarian, and Green Parties.
Mark Moore, who was an independent candidate for the Arkansas legislature in 2012 and who polled 39% in a two-person race, has spent years working on a documentary on ballot access, with a special emphasis on Arkansas. Moore won a federal lawsuit against the early petition deadline in Arkansas and he is deeply into the subject.
Here is the link. The you tube is one hour and twentyseven minutes.
It opens with a fascinating interview with Mark Martin, former Republican Secretary of State of Arkansas.
On February 25, the New Mexico Senate passed SB 180 by 23-13. The bill has many election law provisions, among them a provision increasing the petition requirement for the non-presidential nominees of qualified minor parties, from 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, to 2%.
New Mexico is the only state that requires the nominees of qualified minor parties to submit a petition to be on the November ballot. The idea was passed in New Mexico in 1969, immediately after the state’s first Hispanic third party, the Peoples Constitutional Party, had appeared on the ballot in 1968.
The Senate vote was party-line. Every vote in favor of the bill was cast by a Democrat; every vote against it was cast by a Republican. If the bill passes the House and is signed into law, the chief victim will be the Green Party, which is the most active qualified minor party in New Mexico. The Libertarian Party, under the law, is a major party and is not affected by the bill.
In order for the Green Party to become a major party (one that nominates by primary) it would need to poll at least 5% for a statewide race. But putting a candidate on the ballot to try to do that will be much more difficult if SB 180 becomes law.
On February 24, the Wyoming Senate passed HB 103, so it is through the legislature. It requires voters to have registered with a political party approximately three months before the primary, in order to vote in that party’s primary. The old law lets anyone switch parties as late as primary day. However, if someone had not been registered to vote previously, that person could still register on primary day and choose a party that day.
Governor Mark Gordon hasn’t said yet if he will sign the bill.
