A Modest Proposal for Ballot-Access Reform
By Rick Sincere | Friday, December 23rd, 2011 | Catch-All, PoliticsThe failure of most of the nationally-profiled Republican presidential candidates to qualify for Virginia’s March 6 primary ballot has set off a kerfuffle of conversation about the state’s ballot-access requirements.
Some say that the 10,000 signature (plus 400 from each of 11 congressional districts) threshold is appropriate and offers a sturdy test of the candidate’s capability to put together an effective campaign organization, with an emphasis on mobilizing grassroots volunteers.
They point out that the requirements are the same ones that must be met by all candidates for statewide office – including U.S. Senate candidates and candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. (I would point out, however, that the time periods allowed to collect the same number of signatures differ. Candidates for the U.S. Senate who want to be on the Republican primary ballot, for instance, must collect all their signatures by March 12; independent candidates for the same office have until June 12 to collect the same number; both have the same starting date of January 1.)
Others say that the requirements are too stiff and serve as a deterrent to candidates who may be able to compete nationally and, indeed, are focusing their energies on early primary and caucus states that could propel them to the level of support they would need to succeed in Virginia and other later-primary states (were Virginia’s filing deadline not so early).
For instance, prominent election-law attorney Christopher Ashby noted on his blog:
Want a sense of how next-to-impossible this is? I know top-flight Virginia political consultants who turned down lucrative petition project contracts from presidential campaigns because they did not think it could be done.
Speaking as someone who has collected literally thousands of petition signatures since my first political campaign in 1991 (and as recently as this year), I can attest to the limited value that petitions have as a ballot-access qualification – if not in all cases, then certainly for presidential campaigns.
The truth is, people don’t sign candidate petitions (distinguished from issue petitions for initiatives in those states that have voter-initiated ballot measures) because they support the candidates. In my experience, most people sign petitions for the same reason they give a quarter to a panhandler: out of a mixture of pity and a sense of “if I do this, he’ll go away.” Genuine interest in the candidate or the process is appreciated but vanishingly rare.
This does not apply so much in truly local elections – city council, House of Delegates – because the candidate is more likely to be known to potential voters and, because of that familiarity, a signature signifies more.
For presidential candidates, however, because of the nature of the nominating process, the emphasis on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina means that the candidates and their organizations are not able to focus their efforts or energies on later primary states like Virginia. Their best volunteers are deployed to those early states, where their skills and dedication are more necessary and better utilized. Virginia and other states become afterthoughts, where focus can be applied only after doing well in Iowa or New Hampshire.
With all this in mind, I make this proposal to start a conversation about how to reform Virginia’s ballot-access rules for major-party presidential primary candidates. If it also starts a conversation about the larger issue of Virginia’s ballot-access requirements for other candidates (including third-party and independent presidential candidates), I welcome that as well.
The most obvious reform would be to reduce the signature requirement. One possibility is to change the statewide threshold to 5,000 signatures, with 200 signatures from each of 6 of the 11 congressional districts.
Absent that basic reform, I recommend that Virginia offer these as alternative methods of entry to the primary election ballot:
(1) Candidates may choose to meet the current requirements of 10,000 signatures statewide plus 400 in each of the eleven congressional districts.
(2) Candidates may choose to present 5,000/200 signatures, plus a filing fee of $5,000.
(3) Candidates may forego the signature requirement entirely and instead pay a filing fee of $10,000.
(4) Candidates may forego the signature requirement entirely and instead present an affidavit showing that, according to the Federal Election Commission, they have received a minimum of $100,000 in contributions from Virginia residents.
These suggestions are not exhaustive. Other permutations might be possible.
Let the conversation begin so that we can produce substantive reform to the process well before the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign cycle (that is, by Wednesday, November 7, 2012).
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About the author
Rick Sincere, twice a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, blogs about politics and culture from Charlottesville. He is the author of two books on U.S. policy toward Africa and has contributed articles to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Examiner, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @rick_sincere.
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18 Responses to "A Modest Proposal for Ballot-Access Reform"
Rick, I’m not crazy about exchanging dollars for signatures. Heck, why not just pay citizens a $1 to sign the petition instead? No doubt collecting signatures is a PITA but having done it a few times now I can tell you that a single person standing in front of a grocery store or library can collect about 100 signatures in about 5 hours on the weekend (even as a Republican in NoVA). If you can’t find 50 volunteers to pitch in 10 hours each in the entire state of Virginia then you’re not a serious candidate.
The cost of signatures is actually more than $1 per signature. The going rate for paid petitioners is about $2.
Other states have far lower filing fees than what I’ve proposed. New Hampshire’s is $1,000, for instance.
I don’t think a non-professional, inexperienced petition circulator can collect as many as 20 signatures an hour. That’s based on my observations of working with such people on numerous occasions over the past 20 years. My personal best is about 200 a day in a 12-hour day, and that’s when I was getting paid for it.
I was saying you could pay the actual voter a buck to sign the petition (not sure if that’s legal or not). So you collected a 100 signatures in 6 hours instead of 5, still not a major difference. And as was mentioned in the other thread, anyone could have collected a few hundred signatures in a single day back in November.
Considering how many of these ballot access requirements are borne from the desire of the major parties to place obstacles in the way of independent and minor party candidates, I can’t help but think they’re just getting bit by their own dog.
Amit-
As someone who has been involved with the process for so long, you know that interest in candidates (and their ability to draw out volunteer help) waxes and wanes depending on a variety of factors. Also, remember how particular Virginia’s petitions are: the signers must do so by county (i.e. if you’re in NoVA and a Prince William resident and a Clarke County resident want to sign, they have to sign on different sheets and its not unheard of that people might be in a different county from where they live on any given day!), plus, a signature can be challenged on something as minute as them signing on the print line and printing on the sign line.
This “law” does a dis-service to Virginians because a candidate that might catch fire later in the electoral process could be banned from the ballot for no good reason. What’s worse, what if the draft McDonnell movement succeeded and Virginia couldn’t vote for him?
I think that Amit hit the nail on the head. How difficult would it have been to have had a volunteer at just a few precincts, spread throughout the Commonwealth? Most precincts (at least, ones in populated areas) have at least a few hundred people show up to vote Republican. Let’s imagine that at each precinct, a quarter of the GOP voters would be willing to sign a petition. If you could even get 50 volunteers to go to their precinct and stand outside asking for signatures, that’s several thousand signatures-in one day. While Virginia’s ballot access rules are stringent, I hardly believe that blame for the failure to meet those rules lies with the rules themselves. The state notified campaigns that they’d have approx. 5 months to prepare. For the sake of simple math, that’s 2000 signatures per month needed. Simply getting a volunteer to show up at local party meetings could get that done.
Can I take a quick poll of people who have already commented (and those who are still planning to comment).
Who has worked on a major petition campaign? (That is, something other than the 125-signature requirement for local office or the House of Delegates.) If you have done so, what was the experience like?
I’m just curious.
I doubt it meets the standard of “major,” but I collected signatures for six candidates this year. The most I could get for any one candidate was 29.
I’ve worked a couple of petition drives. For me the process was tedious but not mentally difficult. Given that I was doing it Arlington, I definitely had many Dems say “no way” but you quickly grow a thick skin to that. I would typically go to one of the libraries on the weekends or an outdoor shopping like area (Shirlington was great because it had a library, grocery store and shopping strip all together). Personally doing it alone was fine with me but two people together makes a huge difference because you catch more signatures when bursts of people come through and you have someone to chat with during the gaps.
The alternate method in my native Maryland is that the additional candidates can be placed on the ballot on the order of the Secretary of State, an elected official who controls elections.
The obvious difference is that in Virginia, the Secretary of the Commonwealth is an appointed Cabinet post.
However, I toss that out as this is going to have some people screaming for reform of the process.
We got 1,000 signatures in 2008–actually 1,500 to ensure we got enough and we had the Virginia Election Commission take a look at the signatures before the deadline to certify we had enough. I agree with Amit that it is a PITA, but not that much of a challenge for a well-managed campaign. A blend of volunteers with experienced people getting $2 to $3 a pop can accomplish it. The fact that Perry and Gingrich could not get their sh** together to manage the process does not say much for how organized their campaigns are in Virginia.
Whether the substitution of signatures for money would help or hurt the democratic process depends on the larger political circumstances. Today, for example, it is the access of a significant number of moneyed political campaigns to the top tier privileges of the RP presidential nomination race that enables the most populist campaign, that of Ron Paul — whether the candidate would actually be good for the people is a different matter — a shot at shaping up the nomination process, and, even winning it, albeit the chance of that is quite small.
A question I would ask is whether today’s state of liberty in the United States does not offer to the friends of liberty better and more urgent targets for action than the contemplated change.
[...] view, this time from Bearing Drift, from a respected colleague Rick Sincere, looks into a different aspect of the primary crisis – ballot access The most obvious reform would [...]
I think it more of a question of access. Access to the candidates themselves. We think we live in a highly accessible era thanks to such innovations as social media, twitter, facebook, blogging etc, but in reality are we really getting to know these candidates early on. Most people in the GOP are still undecided. Are people merely signing petitions because its for a “republican” or a “democrat” regardless of whom the candidate really is. Take Hunstman for example. He has very little name id in Virginia and unless your a politcial junkie have no clue who he is in Virginia at this point…. yet during the courting period for candidates he is expected to have ground games working in all primary states, garner all the signatures there with bascially what equates to a start-up company (his campaing team). He does not have the money like a Romney or the establishment support of the GOP where insiders are calling all the local GOP committees enlisting support for their candidate (ie Romney) to get out and get signatures. Its even harder for an independent to crack that code. Do we really want these campaigns to start two full years before the actual election day? Not merely in the media but on the ground. That is what will come out of this. Candidates in order to establish themselves and their machine will have to begin even earlier now in order to get supporters aligned with them just to get on the ballot. Do we really what to encourage this? It will be good for the consultants I guess but probably not the rest of us.
I agree with Mr Foerster. These laws were originally written to keep independents and third parties off the ballot. These guys have all been supportive of restrictive ballot access. If it trips them up in turn, I don’t have much sympathy.
Primaries are essentially state subsidies for political parties, the proper response to this situation is to eliminate government-run primaries altogether so that parties have to sponsor their own nomination process.
That said, if we can’t privatize the nomination process, then the only reform should be to reduce the petition requirement (for all candidates and parties) to 1/10th of the current number, rounded up to the next nearest 10. This would reduce statewide petitions to 1,000 signatures for president, governor, US Senate, etc; and congress to 100 signatures; Delegate to 20 signatures.
I have collected thousands of petition signatures on both major and minor ballot drives.
Anyone who thinks petition requirements are compatible with a free society needs to research the history and justifications for these oppressive laws a bit more.
One of the more disturbing aspects of this is the opinion of some that a candidate doesn’t deserve to be able to appeal to voters unless they’re organized enough to get __________ volunteers to waste several of their weekends collecting signatures. Do you not realize this plays right into the hands of the corrupt media, who spoon-feed candidates to the American public? Do you *really* want the media to decide not only who wins, but even who gets to compete?
Forcing alternative candidates — who haven’t been given the chance to appear in the modern “public square” that is the media — to utterly exhaust themselves collecting signatures is a reprehensible practice in a society that bills itself as “free”.
I do not agree that governments have any authority to print ballots at all. Open ballots not printed or controlled by governments at all gave us men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/article/history-of-voting
Compare them — even with all of their faults — to the modern crop of corruptocrats.
[...] Rick Sincere (Bearing Drift) [...]
As someone who got tapped in Gingrich’s signature campaign, I can say that it really was a pain in the rear (especially since the campaign wanted things organized by CD if possible as well, which meant that I think I had to hand in about ten forms with roughly forty signatures). The shift to the shorter form this year was a mixed bag (you could fit fewer signatures per form, but it would fit on standard copy paper). The fact that if anybody else handled a form, I had to arrange to get them to sign and notarize their forms didn’t help things. Mind you, someone could put a fake name and address on my form in front of me just as easily as they could put one on the form out of my sight.
By the way, one thing I’ve suggested to some people would be allowing (at the very least) write-ins in the Presidential Primary (and only the Presidential Primary). It wouldn’t be an ideal fix, but it would at least let supporters of the half-dozen or so other candidates who were more or less locked out of the process vote for someone. I’m going to dare say that about 65% of likely primary voters in Virginia aren’t going to have their choice on the ballot right now.
[...] eleven congressional districts. As many voters (and even longtime political activists) recently learned with regard to the Republican presidential candidates seeking access to the March primary ballot, Virginia requires statewide candidates to collect a [...]
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