Rhode Island has the nation’s most restrictive ballot access laws. The graph below shows how Rhode Island’s ballot access laws make RI an outlier relative to every other state’s ballot access laws. The vertical axis represents the number of signatures required for party status shown as a ratio with the total population of a state. The horizontal axis shows how long a time period the state allows for the signature collection process.
**Data in this graph provided by Richard Winger of Ballot Access News.
Ballot access law provides a mechanism for candidates and parties to gain access to the ballot. In Rhode Island, a new party can only gain state recognition as a party (and thus access to the ballot) through the following mechanisms: - Run a candidate for President who wins 5% of the statewide vote in a presidential election. The Reform Party qualified for ballot access using this mechanism after the 1992 elections when Ross Perot won more than 5% of the vote across the nation. The Reform party held party status in RI in 1994 and 1996, losing their status after the 1996 presidential elections.
- Run a candidate for Governor who wins 5% of the statewide vote in a gubernatorial election. The Cool Moose Party qualified for ballot access using this mechanism after the 1994 elections when Bob Healey ran as an independent candidate for Governor and won more than 5% of the vote. It is important to note that the Cool Moose Party did not and was prevented by law from existing during the entire course of the 1994 elections. Only after Healey won more than 5% of the vote was the Cool Moose Party allowed to come into existence.
- Collect signatures equivalent to 5% of the last voter turnout for either a presidential or gubernatorial vote in RI. No party has ever qualified for the RI ballot via the signature collection process.
The core problem with RI’s ballot access law is that RI law stipulates that the signature collection process can not commence until January 1 of the year of the election that ballot access is desired. So, for the MPRI, we must wait to begin collecting signatures until January 1, 2010. RI Campaign Finance law says that a group must have state recognition as a party before the group can fundraise using party rules, as opposed to Political Action Committee (PAC) rules. This results in a massive financial hardship to the new party. A PAC can only spend $1,000 to support any one candidate in an election, while a political party can spend up to $20,000 on any one candidate. A PAC can receive only $1,000 from any one donor, while a political party can accept up to $20,000 from a single donor.
Based on the 2008 presidential election turnout, the MPRI will need to collect 23,500 certified signatures to gain party status. Typically, close to half of signature petitions are thrown out by the local Boards of Canvassers, meaning that for the MPRI to gain party status we need to collect 40,000 signatures and plan on having close to half of those signatures rejected.
Only twice in the history of US election law has a new political party qualified for ballot access by meeting a 5% threshold for signature petitions. George Wallace accomplished this feat in California in 1968, and the California Progressive Party did it in 1937. In both cases, these new parties had no restrictions on how long they had to collect these signatures. Rhode Island burdens a new party with the nations highest threshold of 5% combined with one of the shortest collection times of 6 months (the time from the beginning of the year to candidate declaration day at the end of June).
In a final, vicious twist, the only mechanism that RI provides for a party to keep their status after a gubernatorial election is for a party’s gubernatorial candidate to win at least 5% of the vote. If a new party spends the first half of the year of the election collecting signatures and NOT raising money or recruiting candidates, how likely is it that this new party, assuming that it can achieve what has never been accomplished in this country before, can keep its status by running a candidate for Governor who can win 5% of the vote with no money in the bank? In fact, what are the chances that this new party can recruit a viable candidate for Governor while it is not a party?
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