If you’re a registered member of a political party, there’s a chance that in the coming days someone holding up clipboard will walk up to your door, pull you aside at a farmers market or catch you at the shops, and ask for your John Hancock.
It’s the annual funfest of designating petitions. Collecting signatures is the way many candidates for office will end up on the ballot, and in local races (like the ones being held this year) it’s a battle fought door-to-door in our communities. And it just started.
The process is not exactly intuitive. So what is petitioning all about? Well, it’s about deciding who ends up on the ballot. Here’s how it works.
Local political parties have already made their nominations through caucusing in recent weeks. But what remains is the petitioning process, when those who were not nominated can get onto the ballot.
Hopefuls may collect signatures from voters registered in their party – this year, they have from June 4 to July 11. If successful, the candidate will appear with any other candidates for that line in a September primary. Voters take part in their own party’s primary, and the candidates run in November on the line or lines they won.
Candidates must collect signatures of 5 percent of the active, registered voters in a party, or either 500, 1,000 or 2,000 signatures, depending on the office (whichever of the two categories is smaller).
Collecting signatures can be a tricky business. Suffice it to say every piece of information on a form must be exactly correct – if a single voter’s address is written as “Delmar” when the Board of Elections records has it as “Bethlehem,” the signature and all other signatures on the petition sheet can be tossed out.
Candidates will likely “walk” their petitions themselves, but many also employ volunteers to carry it on their behalf. Some candidates will pool their efforts with other campaigns and ask voters to sign on to several candidates in one go.
Phew. So, what should voters be sure to remember? Firstly, know that you only give one signature per office – you can’t sign for both supervisor candidate A and candidate B. You also can only sign a petition for the party you’re enrolled in. Oh, and if you lie about anything and affix your signature to a petition, it could well be considered perjury (Democrats in Troy could tell you a little about that).
But wait, there’s more! There’s also a thing called an opportunity to ballot. If a candidate gathers up enough signatures, this will open up a write-in position on the September primary ballot next to an endorsed candidate who has no individual primary opponent.
A candidate may then stage a write-in campaign to take the line from the endorsed candidate. As an example, this mechanism allowed Jack Cunningham to wrest the Working Families Party line from Sam Messina in the 2009 Bethlehem supervisor race.
The period to circulate these opportunity to ballot petitions is June 25 to July 18 this year.
If that doesn’t sound like enough paperwork, there’s of course more. Most candidates will also form a campaign committee to handle all the matters of money. The candidate or his/her committee must register with the state Board of Elections and then submit campaign finance disclosures at certain intervals. The public can access that information (donations and expenses) through the board’s website.
(Candidates who don’t spend more than $1,000 are not required to submit itemized reports. The utility of these public reports is also somewhat dubious; the law requires committees to submit a disclosure report 11 days before an election, and 10 days after. So whatever money changes hands in the days leading up to the election is masked until the votes have already been cast.)
This all means that when you give money to a candidate, that contribution is out there for the world to see. Under state law, anonymous donations must be handed over to the state and placed in the general treasury.
The point is, you have important decisions to make well before the voting booth. We hope this information helps.