Ballot Access

OK so I’m taking this class called “Managing Political Campaigns” with Commissioner Mike Quigley. We’ve had some pretty amazing guest speakers:

Julianna Smoot, Barack Obama’s National Finance Director-probably the best finance director in the history of politics, no exaggeration.

Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Howard Dean in ‘04 and John Edwards in ‘08.

This Thursday, Mark Halperin, political analyst for TIME magazine who runs one of the more popular campaign websites: The Page.

But for the purposes of this website, the most significant speaker we’ve had is Mike Kasper. He’s an election lawyer for the Illinois Democratic Party, and a professor in the Loyola-Chicago law school. He’s been described as “[Illinois] house speaker Michael Madigan’s favorite election lawyer.” Why? He’s an expert at knocking people off the ballot using “ticky-tacky technicalities.” He bragged in his lecture to our class that he knocked an incumbent mayor in Indiana (Pennsylvania, maybe?) off the ballot for forgetting to number the pages on his petitions. So basically Madigan, described by Quigley as “the kingpin of kingpins,” sends Kasper around to knock as many people off the ballot as possible who challenge Madigan’s handpicked candidates, and that’s just within the Democratic Party.

Ballot access is a huge issue for third-parties, obviously. At the Nader speech, they said they needed 25,000 signatures to get on the ballot in Illinois, which would mean they have to collect 50,000 to survive a challenge by Kasper. Nader was knocked off the ballot in Illinois in 2004. Kasper said in his lecture that there are a certain number of signatures required for a Democrat or Republican candidate, (somewhere around 3,000) and then you multiply by ten to get to the number of signatures for an independent candidate, in most states.

So I thought I’d pass along this website called “Ballot Access News.” Most importantly, it has a nifty little table in its March 2008 newsletter, showing just exactly how many signatures are needed for a party to get on the ballot and a running count of how many each of the third parties have collected. You can look at the tables, but they’ll probably be updated as soon as new info comes in.

So currently, the Green Party is on the ballot in 21 states. The Libertarian Party is on in 28 states. The Constitution Party is on in 16 states. The Reform Party is on in 9 states. The Libertarians appear to have enough signatures to get on the ballot in Nebraska and North Carolina, and are close in New Hampshire, Ohio and South Dakota. The Greens are close in Alaska, Arizona and Utah. The Constitution Party is close in Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia. Some of the values listed are “in court.” All of the parties have values listed in some states called “can’t start.” I’m not sure what that means, other than there might be a certain threshold needed to be met by a certain date, and the parties missed their deadlines.