RALEIGH - A judge has upheld North Carolina's high standard requiring tens of thousands of signatures to be collected before a group is officially recognized as a political party. He ruled that no fundamental right exists for the party of a voter's choice to be on the ballot.The Libertarian Party sued the state in 2005, arguing that requirements to get on the ballot and stay on it are too onerous, violating party members' rights to freedom of speech and association. The Green Party of North Carolina later joined the lawsuit.
Source: Raleigh News & Observer
Related: Read the Decision on WikiLeaks Dime [warning pdf file]
Too onerous? 70,000 signatures? Apparently the LPs and the Greens need a marketing strategy, instead of a legal strategy. They already have whining down to a fine art...
It gets better:
Just when you think North Carolina governance cannot sink any lower….Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood sided with the state and upheld restrictions on recognizing parties not Republicrat. In other words, adding more than two choices to the ballot would burden the state and confuse voters.
“The more parties there are that are recognized by the State and that place candidates on the ballot, the greater the chance there is for ballots that are so long as to be unwieldy and to risk voter confusion and frustration of the electoral process,” Judge Hobgood’s opinion claims.
Source: Jeff Taylor, in the Meck Deck outlet of the John Locke Foundation.
Archive Link in case the original "disappears".
But wait, there's more:
North Carolina has one of the most restrictive ballot access laws in the nation. Currently, third parties must collect more than 67,000 valid signatures to be listed on the ballot. That is the equivalent to 2 percent of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election. The Libertarian Party successfully collected about 79,000 valid signatures to be on the fall ballot, but the effort took four years and cost nearly $140,000.
The Green Party has never appeared on the North Carolina ballot.
Source: Indy Week
If it took the Libertarians $140,000 and four years to gather 79,000 signatures, I can say nothing more to add to, or subtract from their status as a movement. The Greens are even worse, never having achieved even that much.
What we have here is a bunch of whiny pot-smoking kids (and graying hippies) who are too stupid to build their own political movement, and too stupid to even take over another political party.
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