Ballot access
Based on Wikipedia: Ballot access
Here's a puzzle that should trouble anyone who believes in democracy: in the United States, the two major political parties have essentially written the rules that determine who gets to challenge them. It's a bit like letting the defending champions of a sport rewrite the rulebook between seasons—technically legal, but you can see how it might create some conflicts of interest.
This is the story of ballot access in America, and it's far stranger than most people realize.
The Gatekeepers of Democracy
When you walk into a voting booth, you probably assume the names you see represent a fair sampling of people who want the job. But those names have survived a gauntlet—one designed not by neutral arbiters, but by the very people who benefit from keeping the list short.
The United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 4, hands control of elections to individual states. "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof." This single sentence created fifty different laboratories of democracy—or, depending on your perspective, fifty different fortresses for incumbent power.
What makes America unusual among democracies is precisely this decentralization. Most democratic nations have uniform national standards for who can appear on a ballot. The United States does not. Cross a state line, and you enter an entirely different world of requirements, deadlines, and bureaucratic hurdles.
The Birth of Ballot Control
For most of American history, political parties printed their own ballots. Voters would grab a party's ticket—often distinctively colored so everyone watching could see your choice—and drop it in the box. It was public, chaotic, and often corrupt.
The 1880s brought reform. Reformers championed the "Australian ballot," named for its country of origin, which introduced the secret ballot we now take for granted. The government would print official ballots listing all candidates, and voters would mark their choices in private. It seemed like pure progress.
But historian Peter Argersinger noticed something troubling in this reform. When the government took control of printing ballots, it also took control of who appeared on them. Power had shifted, and that power could be abused. Legislatures controlled by established parties could write laws that conveniently burdened their potential challengers while exempting themselves.
Which is exactly what happened.
The Signature Game
John Henry Wigmore, one of the most prominent advocates of the 1880s ballot reforms, suggested that perhaps ten signatures might be appropriate to get on the ballot for a legislative office. Ten signatures. That was the reformers' vision of a reasonable barrier to prevent purely frivolous candidacies.
Today, a third-party candidate trying to run for the House of Representatives in Georgia needs signatures from five percent of all registered voters in their district. That's somewhere between 20,000 and 27,000 signatures—depending on the district.
Democrats and Republicans? They get on automatically because their party received at least twenty percent of the vote in previous elections.
The result is exactly what you'd expect. As of 2022, no third-party House candidate from Georgia had successfully collected enough signatures to appear on the ballot in nearly sixty years. Not one. In six decades.
Georgia isn't unique; it's just extreme. The pattern repeats across the country with varying intensity.
A State-by-State Maze
Consider what a new political party faces in Arizona. To gain ballot access, you must gather signatures on a county-by-county basis, accumulating over 20,000 valid signatures from registered voters. "Valid" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence—signatures get thrown out for technicalities, so experienced petition gatherers know you need to collect twenty to thirty percent more than the minimum to safely clear the bar.
Once you've achieved this, you haven't won permanent access. You've earned a two-year trial. Your candidate for Governor or President must then receive at least five percent of the vote, or your party must maintain at least one percent of all registered voters registered with your party, or you must gather those 20,000-plus signatures all over again.
In Alabama, the math is different but the challenge remains. You need three percent of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election—that worked out to 35,412 valid signatures for 2016 and 2018. And to keep your place on the ballot for the next election? Your party must poll twenty percent in a statewide race. Twenty percent. For a minor party just trying to establish itself.
Colorado offers a somewhat more accessible path. Candidates can bypass party assemblies entirely and collect signatures directly. The numbers are manageable—ranging from 500 signatures for State Board of Education up to 1,500 for governor and United States Senate. But the system still distinguishes between major parties (defined as those whose gubernatorial candidates received at least ten percent in the last election) and everyone else.
Illinois: A Case Study in Complexity
Illinois provides a particularly instructive example of how these systems work in practice. The state formally distinguishes between "Established Parties"—primarily the Democrats and Republicans, though other parties can achieve this status county by county—and everyone else.
For statewide offices like Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Comptroller, Treasurer, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and United States Senator, an Established Party candidate needs between 5,000 and 10,000 signatures. That's substantial but achievable for an organized campaign.
A new party or independent candidate seeking the same offices? They need at least 25,000 signatures, or one percent of all voters who cast ballots in the preceding general election—whichever is less. That's two and a half to five times the burden placed on major party candidates.
The disparity grows sharper as you move down the ballot. For a seat in the House of Representatives, an Established Party candidate needs signatures from just half a percent of primary voters in their party within that congressional district. A third-party candidate or independent needs signatures from five percent of all voters who cast ballots in that district in the previous general election.
That's a tenfold difference in the percentage—and since general elections draw far more voters than party primaries, the absolute numbers are even more lopsided.
The Constitutional Question
You might assume the Constitution protects a fundamental right to run for office. It does not.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled in multiple cases that while voting rights receive strong constitutional protection, the right to candidacy is another matter. States, the Court has held, have a "legitimate government interest in blocking frivolous or fraudulent candidacies."
That phrase—"frivolous or fraudulent"—has proven remarkably elastic. What began as a rationale for preventing joke candidates has justified requirements that make serious third-party campaigns nearly impossible in many states.
The official justification runs like this: with plurality voting (often called first-past-the-post), the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority. If too many candidates split the vote, you could end up with an officeholder opposed by most voters.
Here's the standard example. Imagine a district where fifty-five percent of voters prefer Candidate A's philosophy and forty-five percent prefer Candidate B's philosophy. If two candidates appeal to that fifty-five percent, they might split the votes—say, twenty-five percent for one and thirty percent for the other. The B candidate, with forty-five percent, wins despite more than half the electorate preferring an A-type candidate.
This is a real phenomenon. It's called vote splitting, and it genuinely can produce perverse outcomes.
But critics of restrictive ballot access note something important: reasonably easy access to the ballot doesn't actually produce the predicted chaos. Many democracies allow easier ballot access than most American states, and they don't drown in frivolous candidates. Voters, it turns out, are reasonably good at ignoring candidates who aren't serious.
International Criticism
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, known as the O.S.C.E., monitors elections worldwide—including in the United States. This organization, which emerged from the Helsinki Accords during the Cold War, exists partly to ensure that democracies actually behave like democracies.
The O.S.C.E. has repeatedly criticized American ballot access laws.
In 1996, United States delegates responded to this criticism by essentially saying: yes, there might be problems, but we have appeal processes and regulatory structures to fix them, so it's not really a breach of our commitments. The O.S.C.E. was unimpressed. Their report on the 2004 presidential election specifically noted restrictive ballot access laws among America's democratic shortcomings.
Perhaps most striking is the Copenhagen Document, part of the Helsinki Accords, which President George H. W. Bush signed on behalf of the United States. This document commits signatory nations to "respect the right of citizens to seek political or public office, individually or as representatives of political parties or organizations, without discrimination." It further commits them to "respect the right of individuals and groups to establish, in full freedom, their own political parties" and to "provide such political parties and organizations with the necessary legal guarantees to enable them to compete with each other on a basis of equal treatment before the law."
Equal treatment before the law. Not "equal treatment unless you're a new party, in which case you need five to ten times as many signatures."
The Courts Occasionally Intervene
Sometimes the judicial system pushes back. In 2016, Federal District Court Judge Richard Story struck down Georgia's requirement that third-party presidential candidates gather signatures equal to one percent of all registered voters. That would have meant about 50,334 signatures. Judge Story ruled this was an unconstitutionally high barrier and imposed a requirement of 7,500 signatures instead.
Georgia's secretary of state appealed the decision.
In 2022, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging Georgia's broader ballot access laws—the same laws that have kept any third party off the ballot for nearly sixty years. The Court's refusal to intervene effectively blessed the status quo.
California's Experiment
California presents an interesting variation. The state allows parties to qualify for the ballot in two ways: either by having a candidate receive at least two percent of the entire statewide vote in the last gubernatorial election, or by having voters equal to at least one percent of that same vote registered with the party by 135 days before any primary election.
In 2019, California tried something more aggressive. The state passed legislation requiring candidates for Governor to publicly release their personal tax returns for the previous five years to appear on the primary ballot. The law initially applied to presidential candidates too, in what was widely seen as a response to President Donald Trump's refusal to release his tax returns.
The courts struck down the presidential provision as unconstitutional. The gubernatorial requirement, applying only to state office, survived—at least for now.
What This Means for Voters
The practical effect of these laws is to dramatically narrow voter choice before voters ever enter the booth. In theory, American democracy offers unlimited political options. In practice, the options that appear on your ballot have been pre-filtered through a system designed by the two dominant parties.
Proponents of reform argue this is fundamentally unjust. If democracy means choosing your representatives, then limiting who can be a candidate limits democracy itself. The signature requirements, filing fees, and bureaucratic hurdles fall disproportionately on challengers to the established order—which is precisely who the established order has an interest in excluding.
Defenders of the current system argue that some barriers are necessary. Without them, ballots could become unwieldy, voters could be confused by dozens of candidates, and vote-splitting could produce absurd outcomes. They note that nothing stops a motivated candidate from meeting the requirements, and that the barriers filter out those who lack serious organizational capacity.
Both arguments contain truth. The question is where to draw the line—and who should be drawing it.
The Deeper Problem
Perhaps the most fundamental issue isn't any particular signature threshold or filing deadline. It's that the rules are written by people who have already succeeded under those rules, and who face competition from people who haven't.
Imagine if major corporations could write the regulations governing their own industries, with those regulations applying only to would-be competitors. We'd recognize this as a problem. Yet in American electoral politics, this is standard practice.
State legislatures, controlled by Democrats and Republicans, write the laws governing who can challenge Democrats and Republicans. The fox doesn't just guard the henhouse; the fox designed the henhouse, installed the locks, and sets the visiting hours.
Some states have begun to address this through independent redistricting commissions and other reforms. But ballot access laws remain largely in the hands of those who benefit from keeping them restrictive.
Looking Forward
The debate over ballot access is really a debate about what kind of democracy America wants to be. A more open system might produce more choices, more voices, and more responsive politics. It might also produce messier elections, more spoiler candidates, and more vote-splitting.
Other democracies have found various solutions to these trade-offs. Ranked-choice voting, used in Australia and increasingly in American cities and states, allows voters to express preferences among multiple candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Proportional representation, used in most European democracies, lets smaller parties win seats in proportion to their support rather than winner-take-all.
These structural changes would reduce the theoretical justification for restrictive ballot access. If voters can rank their choices, vote-splitting becomes less of a concern. If smaller parties can win representation proportionally, they have a path to power without needing to win pluralities.
But such reforms require changing the system—and that change must come from the people currently benefiting from it.
In the meantime, the maze of ballot access laws remains. Each state guards its entrance differently. And the two-party system, whatever its origins, has proven remarkably adept at building walls around itself.
The next time you see a ballot with only a few names on it, you might wonder: who else wanted to be there? And what did the gatekeepers demand before they'd let anyone through the door?