It’s time we looked at the rules for signature collection and ballot qualification.
I am calling on the Boston City Council to offer a Home Rule Petition to change the requirements regarding signature gathering to qualify for the ballot in municipal elections. As it now stands, candidates for Mayor must gather 3000 signatures, and any registered voter from Boston can sign as many nomination papers as they want, but only the first signature certified will count toward the potential candidate’s total.
That’s not right. It’s an unfair barrier to getting on the ballot, and it mostly affects candidates of color, candidates who aren’t as well funded as others, and candidates without networks that take years to build. If you can get 3000 valid signatures, you should be able to get on the ballot. Boston’s rules should be closer to the Commonwealth’s rules.
To that end, I pledge my legislative support to any Boston Home Rule Petition that makes its way to the Massachusetts House floor.
Marty Walsh
What about other forms of government in MA — aldermen, selectmen, town meeting members?
Unlike State elections, where a Party-affiliated or unenrolled voter can sign for as many of that Party’s candidates for a given office in a primary, Boston candidates in City preliminary elections have a first-come-first-served process, per City ordinance.
In other municipalities, it’s up to local government to decide the process.
As far as I know, cities and towns all set their own rules around elections and signature requirements. Boston’s rules are definitely set by the City Charter, whcih can only be changed via Home Rule Amendment and/or the establishment of a Home Rule Charter Commission.
However, I’m not aware of any other city/town that has signature requirements like Boston that restrict the ability of residents to support the nomination of more than one candidate. I do know of other cities – like Worcester – that do not have such rules.
In ordinary circumstances this really isn’t a major impediment to candidates. If there’s only a handful of Mayoral candidates, then getting 3,000 unique signatures is a fairly reasonable standard. BUT, in an open election like this, I do agree with Rep. Walsh that it starts to get pretty onerous.
Imagine, if you will, that there are 24 candidates seeking signatures to run for Mayor. That means – for all to qualify – a minimum of 72,000 registered voters need to sign one of the candidates petition. With the standard for leading candidates being a 2-1 ratio, I think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 5 candidates will gather at least 6,000 such signatures. So, that’s another 15,000 registered voters. Nearly 100,000 signatures, then, would need to be gathered in order for all 24 candidates to be nominated for the election. Yet, in the last Mayor’s race, only 111,000 total votes were cast for Mayor! Some registered voters might sign a petition and not vote but I think it’s clear that requiring a substantially large majority of actual likely voters to sign a nominating petition is an unrealistic expectation.
It’s too late to change this now. And Rep Walsh knows that. So, a lot of this is political posturing by a State Rep running for Mayor against a number of current City Councillors. Still, after we inevitably see the field of 24 dramatically winnowed by this difficult signature gathering system, I agree that this is worth revisting.
One could argue that perhaps one’s last signature should count instead of the first, since you might have a better idea of who you would prefer, but that would be logistically more difficult and would leave candidates with uncertainty about whether their signatures would hold up. I do think that signature gatherers should be required to tell you that you may only nominate one person, because currently they do not always do that.
In any case, I would argue that if you cannot manage to gather 3000 signatures, whatever the reason, you have absolutely no chance of getting enough support to win the office. That really is not that large a number for a city of >600K,000 citizens.
They will need at least 72,000 unique signatures to all qualify. For a city with only about 110,000 actual voters in a Mayor’s general election that seems like a lot to me.
As of March there were 388, 658 registered voters in the City of Boston.
If a candidate can’t get one percent of that total on their nomination papers, they have no business running for Mayor.
To be honest, that is really way too many people for me to evaluate. If some of those get winnowed out because they can’t get enough support, I think that is just fine.
They’d like to discourage having 24 candidates, some of whom are lacking in true popular support.
it is which nomination paper get turned into the election department and recorded first. In fact, the papers are time stamped when received so that if there is a conflict, the nomination paper that is received and checked first gets the credit.
I think this process can be improved for 2015 and beyond but now that the process has started for 2013, it is too late to change it. Personally, I would like to see the electoral college abolished and go to a popular vote, but if such a change was introduced after some primaries had already occurred, it would be unacceptable. I know that we are just at the signature gathering stage, but the process has begun and candidates who have been preparing a strategy of collecting thousands of signatures should not have to start over at square one again.
Further, I realize that the entire “Home Rule Petition” may explicitly prevent change the rules for this year, but that isn’t defined in the original post, and as such, I am concerned that this change at this late date will be seen as “self-serving”.
Marty: I would like to suggest that you change your proposal to make it clear that it is only for 2015 and beyond and would in no way affect this year’s process.
First, you don’t think the rule is necessarily bad because, apparently, you think signing to let someone on the ballot is somehow like a vote, a statement of preference for that candidate. There are huge problems with that view, yet you don’t even try to defend it or argue for it, you just assume it. Can you explain why you believe it would be good to regard signing a ballot access petition to be equivalent to supporting that candidate? What are the merits of such a problematic thing?
You do realize, I hope, that that theory is a rare one. Ballot access petitions don’t have this requirement for most offices; Boston’s rule is an aberration.
Secondly, you write “I would argue that if you cannot manage to gather 3000 signatures” — but that’s not the point here. Pretend you’re a candidate and collect 4000 signatures, and it turns out that 2000 of them signed someone else’s petition and you didn’t know it. Now you don’t qualify. How many signatures would you really have to collect to have confidence that you’ve got enough?
“Error rates” – the number of petition signers who turn out not to match registered voters – are reasonably predictable, and campaigns generally know what margin of headroom they need for safety. But the nature of the only-one-counts problem is different, because there’s a high non-random correlation between people willing to sign these petitions, and reachable to sign these petitions. Attendees of neighborhood civic organizations, for example. Which means that the more candidates are trying to qualify in a race, the higher the likely overlap, and the more signatures each one needs to collect for safety… which leads to a vicious cycle.
This isn’t about whether you can or can’t get 3000 voters to sign your petitions. It’s partly about making it extremely unpredictable how many voters you actually need to get, or how much time you’re going to need to spend doing it.
I do not think that signing a ballot is exactly the same as a vote, but personally I would not sign for someone that I would not be willing to vote for. I don’t necessarily believe there is anything wrong with allowing people to sign more than one nominating petition, but I am not convinced the current rule is necessarily all that bad or is really disenfranchising anyone. As I said, even with this rule in place, I assert that anyone who is not organized and determined enough to obtain 3000 valid signatures would have had little hope of winning.
As to error rates, if you tell people up front they can only sign one petition, then most people will remember if they have already signed one, so I don’t think the error rate argument is a particularly strong one.
I would like to hear an explanation of the rational behind the current rule. Is it meant to discourage some type of fraud in which signature companies could gather a set of people who will sign any petition for a fee? Was it specifically intended to drive down the number of people who will be able to get enough signatures? Does anyone know the history behind this?
to sign nomination papers for municipal elections? After all, all they would be saying is “I believe this candidate should be permitted to run for the office, not that this is my vote for him, or her”. The petition is just to get on the ballot, it’s not the election. I might want multiple candidates to run for an office and present their best argument why I should then cast my single vote for one of them I deem the best choice for the job.
…”sign nomination papers for multiple elections?”
You mean “sign nomination papers for multiple candidates in a single election.” 😉
Will they stop certifying signatures after a specific threshold? My recollection for state race (state rep, senator, etc.) is that the clerks stop certifying at twice the required number. Does the same rule apply?
This could have an impact. A candidate could intentionally get much more signatures than needed if it was a goal to keep the number of candidates low. Or stop turning in signatures with a smaller buffer if the goal was to have more candidates.
For example, for Mayor, where the threshold is 3000 good signatures, Elections counts to 3,600.
I appreciate the informatin. Kate
Hiw do they check all the ballots to make sure the signees are not duplicates. Is there some IT for this?
…but signature-checking can be done with off-the-shelf software like Access.
The City, of course has more sophisticated applications, like scanning and handwriting-recognition technology that cross-references signatures with those of file with the Registry.
But, to repeat, it’s still time consuming given the sheer number of municipal candidates this year.
…with the Commonwealth’s Voter Registration Information System.