(From left) Green Party congressional candidate Bob Hart, joined Sherry Clark, Charlie Earl and other Libertarians October 1 at the State House for a Senate hearing on Senate Bill 193
photo: Lorn Mullenix
Found in The Columbus Free Press
By Bob Fitrakis, October 3, 2013
Ohio Republican Senator Bill Seitz (District 8) is at it again. His Senate Bill 193 is out to purge Ohio minor parties from the ballot.
On Friday, September 20, former Ohio State Representative Charlie Earl announced that he is running for governor as a Libertarian candidate next year. By Tuesday, Seitz was holding hearings on his new bill that would make it difficult for Earl to stay on the ballot.
Earl ran as the Libertarian candidate for Ohio Secretary of State in 2010 and received nearly 5 percent of the vote. In his announcement, Earl claimed he had “Tea Party support.”
The bill requires minor parties to get 3 percent of the presidential vote in order for their party to stay officially on the Ohio ballot. Essentially, minor parties will be removed from the 2014 ballot on the grounds that they did not pass a vote test – that was not in existence in 2012. Seitz’s bill appears to violate due process by requiring minor parties to undergo this process in 2014.
Richard Winger, perhaps the nation’s leading expert on minor party politics, points out that in the last 90 years, only three third parties received at least 3 percent of the presidential vote nationwide: the Progressive Party in 1924, the American Independence Party in 1968, and the Reform Party in 1996.
All existing minor parties would be thrown off the ballot under Seitz’s bill including the Libertarian Party, whose last gubernatorial candidate received a little more than 2 percent of the vote, and the Green Party whose gubernatorial candidate got almost 2 percent of the vote.
In Seitz’s new bill, a newly qualifying party must also submit both a petition to obtain party status and separate petitions for each of its nominees. If minor parties are to be on the ballot in 2013, the bill requires that they first obtain 55,809 valid signatures.
The Democrat and Republican Parties don’t need to submit any signatures to officially be on the ballot.
Please find the rest of the article
right here .
Perhaps the Ohio LP should tell Sen. Seitz that, should his bill pass, they will all be forced to re-register as Republicans and run in the primaries as Republicans advocating the most outrageous hard-core Libertarian views to completely destroy the Republican brand. I’ll bet the liberal-leaning media would love to interview a bunch of “Starchild” GOP candidates!