There may be some downballot candidates on your ballot this year.
Now that the Republican and Democratic primary runoffs are over, independent candidates are scrambling to qualify for the November ballot in Texas.
Instead of paying a filing fee or appearing on the primary ballot like major party candidates, state law requires independent candidates to collect hundreds or even thousands of signatures to get on the ballot.
The names can only be from people who didn’t vote in either party’s primary — and candidates only have a narrow window to find them.
The collection process starts after the Republican and Democratic primaries are over their race, and must be submitted to the Secretary of State’s office by June 25.
As of this week, one San Antonio-area congressional candidate who’s been preparing his campaign for nearly a year now said he’s quickly found the signature collection process to be all but impossible.
U.S. Air Force IT specialist Gerard Villalobos planned to run as an independent in U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro‘s (D-San Antonio) 20th Congressional District, and even bought a digital billboard to help get his name out.
“I have been trying hard [for] the past two months … my platform is sincere,” he said Monday. “Unfortunately, per the Texas Legislature, I can only move forward after I have 500 signatures validated … and I doubt I reach that number.”
Seriously? Dude, CD20 is entirely within Bexar County, so it’s not like you have to troop all over the state. There were over 400K registered voters in CD20 as of November 2024. Some 66K voted in the Dem primary this year, with another 9K in the Republican primary. Conservatively, well over 300K available registered voters for you to seek signatures from, and you only needed 500 of them, less than 0.2% of the total. This sounds like a you problem to me. And I say that as someone who personally knows someone who successfully qualified for a Congressional ballot as an indie.
There is of course the bigger picture.
This week all of Texas’ independent hopefuls got a boost from a national group trying to build a third political party in the U.S. —which is suing the state over its signature requirements.
By law, political parties can only place candidates on the ballot in Texas if they follow strict rules to secure and maintain ballot access.
For the Green and Libertarian parties, that means having a statewide candidate who garners at least 2% of the vote in each major election.
This week the Forward Party, which wants to join their ranks, joined a lawsuit against the state arguing that the bar is impossibly high.
In fact, they say, no independent candidate has ever successfully qualified for the ballot in a Texas statewide race that had a primary runoff, because the timeline is even shorter to collect signatures.
The Forward Party was created by former elected Republicans and Democrats at a national level in 2022, and has already achieved minor party status in several states.
But to do so in Texas, it would have also had to collect more than 80,000 signatures this year — a goal its leaders have abandoned.
“The Texas Forward Party would not have been able to get the signatures to get on the ballot this year, just because of the sheer number of signatures,” said Texas Forward Party Chair Brandon David. “So, we have forgone going after party ballot access, and instead we are lifting up and supporting independent candidates that are trying to get on the ballot.”
The party’s lawsuit argues that the compressed timeline to collect signatures, along with the restrictions on who can sign, are aimed squarely at keeping candidates who aren’t from one of the major parties off the ballot.
It has the backing of the Center for Competitive Democracy, as well as a surprising list of past and present Texas officials who’ve signed onto the effort.
“[Texas’ ballot requirements are] exactly the kind of political gatekeeping that has left so many Americans feeling shut out of our democracy,” Forward Party CEO Lindsey Drath said in a statement. “ … This lawsuit is not about helping one candidate or hurting another party. It is about whether the rules of our democracy should serve voters or protect the two-party status quo.”
We know about the lawsuit, and for the time being I have nothing to add to that. But I must point out this gem from that NBC News story about the Forward Party, which we first heard about here in 2023.
Two pillars of the new party’s platform are to “reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy” and to “give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future.”
The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: “How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward.”
Emphasis mine. In the way that the word “conservative” has lost all meaning, so has “centrist”, which in the hands of a dweeb like Andrew Yang is basically just vibes. As I said before, the big problem for these guys is that if you write down a list of sensible, “centrist”, solutions-oriented principles for your third-party platform, you will find that there’s a significant amount of overlap with the Democratic Party platform. Not all of it, to be sure, and there is a robust debate in the Democratic Party about where that platform ought to be. I’m just saying, there’s a reason why these jokers haven’t bothered to articulate actual positions. It’s too embarrassing for them.
I won’t be unhappy if Texas moves to affiliated voter registration and closed primaries. I can’t fault the plaintiffs who are contesting these qualification issues that are mostly related to open primaries.
As legitimately difficult as it is to qualify for the ballot as an independent, it is laughably easy to get on the ballot as a nominee for a minor party. In the case of the Green party, for example, it takes emailing a party leader and then (possibly not even) showing up for their state convention. No signatures and little or no money.
One wonders what signal is being sent by those who won’t even do that. “I can’t stand any and all political groups so much, you should elect me to go work with them.”
“statewide candidate who garners at least 2% of the vote in each major election”
i’ve always thought 3rd parties should have a slower “eliminated from contention” trigger, instead of one election falling out of 2%, it should be 3 elections of no-show
usually, a new 3rd party rests on one candidate to start, if they exit the scene, giving the party a little bit more time to found itself, and loft options at voters seems a democratically healthful idea