What is Ballot Access?

When we speak of "ballot access" we are referring to the laws, or statutes, that determine the rules one must meet to have a candidate's name printed on the ballot that a voter sees when they vote at a polling place.

These sort of laws exist in every state, and are different in each state. Here in Georgia, our ballot access laws separate the elections into the statewide elections, those where every voter in Georgia can participate, and districted races, those such as US House and Georgia General Assembly, where only voters in a specified area participate.

Additionally, the laws specify different rules determined by your association designated as "political party", "political body" and independent. The LP of Georgia is a "political body".

For a political body, the rules for statewide elections specify that any statewide candidate can qualify for ballot if they meet one of two criteria. If the political body, in the current year, secures a nominating petition of 1% of registered voters they can qualify for the ballot. Or, if the political body ran a statewide candidate in the previous general election that earned a vote total equal to 1% of the registered voters in that election.

The LP of Georgia first earned statewide ballot access by nominating petition in 1988 and has retained that ballot access through earned votes every general election since. To lose our ballot access would mean we would have to do a nominating petition of about 80,000 signatures for each statewide candidate we wanted to place on the ballot.

Ballot access for the districted elections is different. For a political body to place a candidate on the ballot in a districted election requires a nominating petition of 5% of the registered voters in that district. These petitions can be as small as about 100 for a partisan school board seat and as high as 25,000 for a US House seat. The Georgia US House petitioning requirements are reputed to be some of most difficult in the nation and in fact have never been accomplished by any candidate since these laws were passed in 1943.