Monday, June 20, 2005

Planning ahead for future races, i.e., 2006

Tim C, the Allegheny County Libertarian Chair wrote in part:
Casey and Santorum are both Pro-Life. So the LPPa (Libertarian Party of PA) could field a Pro-Choice candidate and get enough votes to hang onto minor party status. The big hurdle, however, is that in 2006 the LPPa will need to gather at least 66,000 valid signatures. This means that we will need about 100,000 raw signatures.

In 2004, we only needed 42,000 signatures. In 2006 we will need 100,000. This is because Casey ran away with the Treasurer's race in 2004 and we now need 2% of Casey's 3.6 million vote total.

We should begin to have a group conversation about how we intend to handle the 2006 ballot access drive. In 2004, LPPa volunteers gathered 21,000 signatures. That would leave us about 79,000 signatures short.

Since 2004 was a Presidential election year, The Badnarik campaign and the National Party each kicked in for enough signarures for the LPPa to get 42,000 total, enough for ballot access in 2004....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ken K from the easter part of PA wrote in part: I don't think we'll be needing the statutorily-required 67,070 signatures to get on the statewide ballot next year. There's a court case, Patriot v Mitchell, which says that you can't ask for more signatures for an inferior election than you do for a higher office.

Since our requirement for president last year was 25,697, the 2006 requirement can't be any higher than that. I've been speaking with attorneys at the election board in Harrisburg over the last two weeks, and they are looking into the matter for us. Their from-the-hip, unofficial guess is that they will likely use either the 2004 presidential number (25,697) or the 2002 gubernatorial number (21,028). I just spoke with their attorney again this morning, and he say they should have an answer for me by today or tomorrow.