State election officials have just blocked three Florida minor parties from appearing on the ballot

By Richard Winger rom Ballot Access News:

During this week, Florida election officials have behaved unethically and violated due process, by eliminating three minor party presidential candidates from the November ballot.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, and America’s Party, were already ballot-qualified parties in Florida, yet their presidential filings have been rejected because they are not recognized by the Federal Election Commission as national committees. But on September 1, 2011, the General Counsel to the Florida Secretary of State ruled that Florida cannot enforce the law that says only national committees may be on for president without submitting 119,316 valid signatures. First, the Secretary of State has no official knowledge of which parties are recognized by the FEC. Second, the law, if enforced, would be discriminatory because the FEC will not grant national committee status to new parties; only parties that have gone through a presidential and a congressional election can obtain it. Third, the FEC itself is not certain which parties are recognized as national committees. I talked to an FEC attorney about this on April 26, 2010. He said it is an “open question” as to whether the Natural Law Party, for example, is still a national committee.

The Socialist Party is recognized by the FEC as a national committee. But Florida won’t print its presidential candidate on the November ballot either. The Secretary of State said on September 6 that the party’s application for party status, filed on August 29, does not meet the requirements of the law. But the letter from the Secretary of State did not explain why. The Socialist Party had submitted the exact same documents in 2016 that it had filed in 2012. Thanks to Darcy Richardson for the news about the Florida Secretary of State’s flip-flop on national committee status.

UPDATE: two Florida officials kindly telephoned me on Thursday, September 8, and gave me reasons why the Socialist Party’s filing was rejected. The first reason is that the Socialist Party’s bylaws provide for dues for members. The state believes that it has the power to tell parties that they must not be organizations with requirements for members to pay dues. However, the First Amendment protects any political party’s right to establish itself as a dues-paying organization, and parties of the left in the United States and around the world have a very long tradition of requiring members to pay dues. The Socialist Party is not saying that persons cannot register into the party if they don’t pay dues. But it is saying that its dues-paying members are the only persons eligible to help choose party officers.