Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Hawaii, the Last Battleground

Well, for those of us who check out third party ballot access at Richard Winger's Ballot Access website, the only state not to have made its final decision on who to exclude from the ballot is Hawaii, which may or may not put Nader and Peroutka on. I assume not, as there is only a week left to re-print ballots.
I think it would be a good idea for some states to formulate a rule that any presidential candidate who is on the ballot in enough states to be elected president (i.e. states with a total of over 270 electoral votes) gets automatic ballot access in that state. If every state did this, it would ultimately mean that candidates would only need to vie for access in a subset of states, and then would get access in all of the rest.
Actually, I think that ballot access should be made easier overall. California's recall proved that you can have an election with hundreds of candidates running and still pull it off successfully. Would each state having ten presidential candidates running really be that bad?
And let's not forget the fascist state of oklahoma, where there are no third-parties on the ballot and no ability to write-in.

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