How about this system:

(1) Early petition due end of July, with 1/50 of 1% of the vote needed. If 9 or fewer candidates qualify, all will appear on the primary election ballot.

(2) If more than 9 qualify, then there is an extended qualification period until the end of August. The top 9 petitioners qualify. In addition, any candidate who has petitions with 1/10 of 1% of the vote, including candidates who didn’t early-qualify will appear on the primary ballot.

(3) Primary at the end of September. Voters may declare a party, but are not restricted as to who they may vote for. Party officials may determine which candidates are eligible for nomination by their party members.

Top 2 qualify, plus any candidate that receives 10% of the vote, plus leading candidates that receive a cumulative 80% of the vote. In addition, the leading vote getter in any party primary in which 1% or more of all voters participate.

(3a) Any party that has 1/10 of 1% of all voters participating in their primary will retain their potential nominating status.

(4) Candidates may withdraw due to death, severe illness or disability, or conviction of a felony. Other withdrawals are permitted, but are prima facie evidence of electoral fraud, subject to a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 1/2 of the term of office.

(5) General election in early November. Majority required for election.

Party nominees will be indicated on the ballot, however, there will be no straight party device, grouping of party nominees by row, column, or ballot order. No candidate may appear on the ballot more than once, though they may have multiple nominations denoted.

(6) Runoff in early November.

This must have been a terrible country when caucuses and conventions were the order of the day for party nominations.

And you definitely wouldn’t want to live in a place like Canada, where party candidates are sometimes hand-picked by the party leaders.

EQUAL nominating petitions.

Way too difficult to understand for lawyer MORONS and Supremes MORONS who have totally screwed up ballot access cases starting with Williams v. Rhodes in 1968 — a mere 40 years of scores / hundreds / thousands (??) of MORON ballot access cases in the courts.

Re:LWV v Brunner. The act of voting is a transaction. An individual (voter) is expressing a preference for another individual (candidate) in exclusion of other persons (citizens) for the purpose of exercising the authority of a specific office. The right of the voter to make this transaction is deemed “fundamental”.

What the ballot access controversy encompasses is the “fundamental” character of the entire transaction between the voter right of exclusion from among the range of all other citizens as candidates. The power to intervene between the voter’s right to exclusion by peremptory exclusion of certain candidates is an abridgment of the voter’s right to choose who, from among all possible candidates, that voter prefers.

In short, the effect of pre-election disqualification of a class of persons which the voter has the sole right to choose from among (by write-in voting, for example) is a violation the voter’s “fundamental” right to vote.

The derivative right of a person to appear on the ballot is just as “fundamental” to the voter’s right to choose as is having the voter’s ballot counted. The denial of the candidate’s derivative right to receive votes and have them counted is an abridgment of the voter’s right to choose.

Hence, all ballot access cases are voter’s rights cases. This principle holds regardless of anyone’s prospective opinion that enough voter’s will prefer a particular candidate to secure their election to office.

The only class exclusions which may used to peremptorily foreclose the voter’s right to choose are explicitly stated in the U.S. and the various state Constitutions (citizenship, age, residence). Without Constitutional Amendment, no branch of government may disqualify candidates from the ballot and thereby abridge the right the voter to choose.

Sidebar: Who would argue that Congress could bar the possession of certain firearms because they are “unlikely” to be lethal if used, or not enough people would purchase them if such firearms were permitted to be sold?

Ballot access restrictions were not crafted by morons, nor are they sustained by morons. One cannot long evade the conclusion that the perpetuation of this violation of voter’s rights over several generations is a deliberate and collusive effort of a political class to entrench themselves. A conspiracy against the people.

For 39th Congress (1865-1867) fans —

Sec. 2 (for political rights – i.e. UNIVERSAL ADULT MALE U.S.A. CITIZEN RIGHT TO VOTE) was deemed much more important than Sec. 1 (for civil rights) in the TWO major speeches on the 14th Amdt in the Congress.

The 14th Amdt has been mystified and subverted by armies of lawyer MORONS since the 1870s.

The removal of Ralph Nader from the Ohio ballot in 2004 resulted in greater disenfranchisement than any of the procedural issues raised in the complaint.

Yet the dupes of the LWV would be content if there was an “accurate” count of votes in a one-party system, so long as there could be expenditutes of $10s/vote.