Vermont requires independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, to submit 1,000 signatures (for statewide office) by June 14. This year, the Justice Party collected over 1,300 signatures to place its presidential nominee, Rocky Anderson, on the November ballot. However, because Vermont requires petitioning groups to first collect the signtures, then submit them to town clerks, then collect them again and take them to the Secretary of State, not all signatures were available by the deadline for submission. Here is the complaint.
On June 27, Rocky Anderson filed a lawsuit. He points out that candidates seeking a place on a presidential primary ballot do not follow this cumbersome procedure, but instead file directly with the Secretary of State. The lawsuit is Anderson v State of Vermont, filed in Superior Court in Montpelier. The Court will hold a hearing within the next two weeks.
The same system of submitting signatures to each town, then picking them up and giving them to the state, is common in New England, but not other parts of the country.
Your claim that the validity boost would be small, allowing that the state would be as efficient as the City of Boston, is completely wrong.
We get plenty good validity in states that have all the signatures on the same form.
Vermont petitions that are all on the same form, such as the primary petitions, manage to do just fine.
@14, I believe we are discussing the process in Vermont.
@10 Your claim that the validity boost would be small, allowing that the state would be as efficient as the City of Boston, is completely wrong.
@13 In Massachusetts, the petitioning process is the same for everyone except Presidential candidates.
George and all:
The Vermont Ballot Access Laws are contradictory. If you are a major party or a recognized minor party, you only need 1,000 submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office. Each Petition Page can have people from anywhere in the state on it, the SOS simply verifies the name on the State’s voter roles. However, if you are a minor (unrecognize) party or an independent, your petitions should have only people from the same town on each petition, so hypothetically you would need 210 individual petitions for each town. Then once you are done with the town, go to the town office (not always open), hand in your petitions (originals only, not copies), have them process the document (when they can), return them to you (in person more preferable than via US Mail), and once it is finally done for all towns, hand them in (all at once) to the SOS at the same time as Mitt’s and Barack’s petition which have not been vetted or checked prior to the deadline. NO explanation has been offered by the minor 3rd parties and independents have to do this, but GOP/Dems/Progs/LP doesn’t.
I would never flip towns if I didn’t have to. Slows things way down.
@9, my question wasn’t if it could be done for the presidential preference primary. My question was WHY isn’t it done for the presidential preference primary if it is such a great idea.
I’ve done it too. It’s a massive headache which is entirely not worth it, particularly when working on more than one petition at a time, or when dealing with your state’s stray mark ruling on initiatives, or Maine’s large format and sometimes multi-page initiative petitions, the sheer amount of paper involved and the time it takes to pull up the right page, more so when you are talking to more than one person at a time, is prohibitive.
Couple that with the gigantic hassle of delivery and pickup from hundreds of towns and there is no way in the world the tiny validity boost from town clerks recognizing street names is even slightly close to being even remotely worth it.
@7 It’s entirely straightforward. I’ve done it. It’s even easier in NH, given how they organize their nominating papers.
@6 Presidential primary candidates can indeed do it this way, though that gets them on in the primary, not the general election.
Given that petitions that are on the same page for the whole state often have validity in the 80s and even in some cases 90s when worked by good petitioners it is completely bizarre to say that town flipping in this day and age is anything except a relic of the pre-computer age and/or a deliberate way to keep candidates, parties and initiatives off the ballot.
Town flipping also makes it very difficult for petitioners to work in locations where there are people from all over the state, such as festivals, colleges and trade shows.
In some New England states like Mass and RI it is pretty easy to get stores, but in others such as Maine it is not easy at all, so often festivals and colleges are the only viable locations.
@4-If it serves such an excellent purpose, why don’t major party candidates have to do it to be listed on the presidential preference primary?
Petitions get checked all over the country and in the vast majority of states there is no town flipping, or even county flipping in many cases. Many states have all signatures on the same page yet are able to get decent validity. Vermont does it in the primary, why not the general election?
The tiny increase in validity that can be achieved by town clerks checking the signatures and recognizing sloppily written street names is far outweighed by the gigantic hassle of delivering signatures to and from dozens or hundreds of towns.
Rocky Anderson is absolutely right here.
@2 It serves an excellent purpose. It ensures that the people who are reviewing signatures are close enough to the electorate to do their job in an honest and accurate manner.
Great comment by Charlotte!
Democracy should always be the first concern when issues like this arise. The procedure of going to the town clerks then going to the state, etc. doesn’t sound as if it serves any purpose other than to keep people off the ballot. What next? A hop sack race?
Vermont is too fine a state to have something like this on the books.
There are two separate issues here:
(1) Is there a reasonable deadline by which Town Clerks must have the nominating papers checked and ready for return (or mailed back to the candidate)? Did they do so?
(1) is a reasonable issue.
(2) “I want them collected centrally and processed centrally”.
That would be a disaster for ballot access. Town clerks do their jobs reliably, almost all of them. Some big cities do. Others give extremely low signature validity rates. Town clerk validation is a critical protection for ballot access.