The Arizona petition for a new, or previously unqualified political party, is so difficult, it has not been used since 2000. The law requires 20,449 signatures, due March 6, 2008.

The Green Party of Arizona is making every effort to meet this requirement. Greens from around the U.S. have contributed $8,000, so that the Arizona Greens have been able to hire paid circulators. To increase interest, several of the Green Party presidential candidates are in Arizona on the weekend of February 23-24. On Saturday, February 23, some will be at the famous Scottsdale Parada del Sol, the world’s largest horsedrawn parade, which culminates in a mass outdoor party called “Trail’s End.” On Sunday, February 24, at 1 pm, all of the declared Green presidential candidates will also attend a party meeting at the Mesa Public Library, Saguaro Room. Ironically, these presidential candidates cannot themselves help circulate the petition, since Arizona doesn’t permit out-of-state residents to do that.

The Green Party’s party petition must succeed, if the party’s presidential candidate is to appear on the November ballot. The party cannot use the independent candidate petition procedure because the deadline for that is June 4, and the party won’t have chosen its presidential candidate until July 13. Arizona does not permit stand-in presidential candidates on the independent petition. Vice-presidential substitution is a moot point, since Arizona does not print the names of vice-presidential candidates on its November ballot. Arizona has the nation’s 2nd earliest independent presidential petition; a Nader lawsuit (filed in 2004) against that independent deadline is pending in the 9th circuit.

The Libertarian Party is the only ballot-qualified party in Arizona currently, other than the two major parties. The Constitution Party has never been on the Arizona ballot as a party, and is not attempting to get on as a party this year.

The South Dakota Constitution Party is almost finished with its petition to regain its place on the ballot. The requirement is 8,398 valid signatures. South Dakota checks petitions on a flow basis, and has told the party that it needs another 621 valid signatures. The party has since collected 200. The deadline is March 25.

The lawsuit filed in January by the Tennessee Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties has a procedural hearing in federal court on March 17. The case, called Libertarian Party of Tennessee v Thompson, challenges the procedures for new and previously unqualified parties to get on the ballot. No one has used those procedures since 1968. The hearing won’t get to the merits of the case, but will establish the ground rules to proceed.

On February 22, the Washington State Senate Government Operations Committee heard HB 1534, a bill to improve ballot access for minor parties and independent candidates. Activists asked that the bill be amended to be even more favorable. The Committee seemed willing to ease the petition deadline (for non-presidential candidates) from May to June, but wasn’t so sure about putting an urgency clause on the bill so that it can go into effect this year.

The Committee will probably act on the bill next week.

Washington state’s ballot access improvement bill, HB 1534, passed the House on February 14. It has a hearing in the State Senate Elections Committee on February 22 (Friday) at 3:30 pm.

The bill does not make all the improvements that had previously been suggested. It still requires each nominee of an unqualified party to submit his or her own separate petition.

However, it improves current law: (1) it lowers the petition requirement for unqualified party candidates for US House, and for independent candidates for US House, from 1,000 signatures to 250 signatures; (2) it expands the petitioning period; (3) for qualified parties (those which are entitled to nominate by primary), the number of votes needed in the open primary for the person to be considered nominated is lowered from 1%, to 1,000 votes for statewide office, 250 votes for US House, and 100 votes for other partisan office. Although there shouldn’t be any minimum vote requirement, at least these minimums are much lower than the old requirement.

Ralph Nader will be one of the guests on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning interview show, on February 24. Thanks to Jack Ross and Thomas Jones for this news. Here is a link to a story about the appearance, from the Associated Press.

The AP story is incorrect to say that Nader got .3% of the vote in November 2004. He received .4% (more precisely, .381%). The article is also deficient to fail to note that Nader did not injure John Kerry in 2004. Both election returns analysis, and poll data from late October 2004, showed that Nader voters were somewhat more likely to vote for George Bush than John Kerry, if they couldn’t vote for Nader. See the Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, page one, for the story about the poll data. See the print version of Ballot Access News, January 1, 2005, for the election returns evidence. Nader’s best state in 2004 was Alaska, and his best county in the U.S. in 2004 was Grand County, Utah. In three-fourths of the states in which Nader was on the ballot in 2004, his best county in that particular state was more in favor of Bush than that state as a whole.

Neither of the bills to improve Oklahoma ballot access have made any headway, and now it is too late for them to advance. SB 28 and HB 1359 were introduced last year. Oklahoma has two-year legislative sessions, and the bills were theoretically alive until they missed the February 21 deadline to make some progress.

All bills to improve Oklahoma ballot access during the last ten years have met the same fate. None of them ever received a committee hearing.

On February 21, the Massachusetts Joint Election Laws Committee passed SB 446. It permits people to register to vote on election day. If it is signed into law, it would take effect in time for the November 2008 election. It only applies to the general elections of 2008 and 2010 and would then expire.

February 21 was the deadline for anyone to file a challenge to the petition of a Democratic or Republican candidate seeking a place on the April 22 Pennsylvania primaries. Approximately 60 challenges were filed. Pennsylvania primary candidates need 2,000 signatures for statewide office. Some statewide offices also have county distribution requirements.

Four candidates filed for the Democratic primary for State Treasurer. They are Dennis Morrison-Wesley, Jennifer Mann, Rob McCord, and John F. Cordisco. McCord challenged Morrison-Wesley and Mann on the grounds that their petitions lacked at least 100 signatures from each of five counties.

All county distribution requirements for statewide petitions were invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, in an Illinois case called Moore v Ogilvie. No state still has any statewide candidate petitions with county distribution requirements except Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania state courts have upheld that state’s county distribution requirements, notwithstanding Moore v Ogilvie. However, in December 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court again reiterated what it had said in Moore v Ogilvie. In Bush v Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “We relied on these principles in the context of the presidential selection process in Moore v Ogilvie, where we invalidated a county-based procedure that diluted the influence of citizens in larger counties in the nominating process. There we observed that ‘the idea that one group can be granted greater voting strength than another is hostile to the one man, one vote basis of our representative government’.”

Bush v Gore gave additional new prestige to the old precedent Moore v Ogilvie, to the extent that lower courts started invalidating county distribution requirements for initiatives. Perhaps one of the challenged candidates for Pennsylvania Treasurer will notice this development in the law, and challenge the Pennsylvania county distribution requirement for statewide petitions.

On February 20, the Oklahoma House Subcommittee on Elections & Redistricting passed HB 2869 and HB 3350.

HB 2869 makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis. HB 3350 expands the period in which to circulate a statewide initiative from 90 days to one year.