There isn’t much time left this year for the legislature to act, but if it doesn’t pass this year, Senator Folmer will reintroduce it next year.
Senator Folmer is looking for Co-sponsors for this bill. If you live in PA please contact your State Senator and ask him/her to co-sponsor, or at least support, SB-1578 “The Voters’ Choice Act”. The bill is the Voters Choice Act drafted by the Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition last year (Greens, Libertarians, Constutution, Prohibition, Naderites and others). Folmer is one of the new Senators who knocked off long time incumbents following the pay raise scandal.
Right now, R’s and D’s need 2,000 signatures for statewide offices. Any other party or an independent needs to collect signatures equal to 2% of the highest total number of votes cast for an office in the previous state-wide election. For 2008, a statewide candidate would need to collect nearly 25,000 valid signatures to be eligible. In 2006, parties needed to collect 67,000 because of the huge turn-out of the 2004 presidential election.
John Murphy, a candidate for Congress in PA’s 16th, played a part in getting this bill to the floor. He is part of PA’s Ballot Access Coalition.
Michael H. Drucker
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1 comment:
Delaware has a generous supply of minority parties on the ballot and it is very interesting that the proposed Pensylvania measure is based on Delaware law. Recently, primaries in the First State have been publicly funded, however, Delaware law requires political parties to have at least 5% of the total number of registered voters to be eligable to participate in a primary. This,in turn, raises a fundamental "equal protection"
constitutional protection in light of the fact that the legal ecology
has changed relative to the original practical intent of the law to spare minority parties the inordinate expense of holding primary elections. Ergo, the Independent Party of Delaware supports inclusion of minority parties in Delaware primaries in order to have a truly level political playing field by removing
the "primary exclusion penalty" on minority parties. There was also a recent bill in the last General Assembly session that would have enabled unaffiliated voters to temporarily declare themselves D's or R's in order to vote in primaries, but this have excluded minority party members.
Wolfgang von Baumgart,
State Chairman,
Independent Party of Delaware
(302) 945-2646
ipodosc@yahoo.com
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