Hello Libertarians. This is the ninth of a series of opinion articles I’ll be privileged to write for you once per month on an “inside baseball” topic for the Libertarian Party. I encourage everyone who has an opinion on whatever we’re talking about this month to comment or send phillies@4liberty.net your longer editorials, which may well be published.
This month is going to be a little different. In the past I’ve given you my opinion on something and then backed up my opinion with reasoning. This time I’m giving you a challenge, like a professor setting an unsolved problem in science or math in front of a class of graduate students. This challenge is going to require interaction, and you likely won’t get much out of the article just by reading it. Even if you don’t come up with a grand unified theory of everything, you should think about this some and then write about it in the comments or submit your own article on the part of the puzzle you think you have the answer to.
The basic question is this: How much should we spend on ballot access? Not in any particular case, but generally.
It seems to me like the question should be solvable given enough information about what all of the variables are that we care about. If we are able to come up with an equation which could help future Libertarian National Committees make good decisions, it would be a useful thing to have going forward over the next fifty years. If we had had it for the last 50 years, we might be in a better place now, even if only incrementally. Small incremental good decisions over time lead to success, so let’s get cracking.
I’d like to start by making an assumption that there is some price below which getting ballot access for a state is a good idea, and above which it is a bad idea. I’ve heard a philosophy before that ballot access in 50 states is infinitely important, and so we should be willing to spend any amount of money on it, including going into any amount of debt. It’s possible that it is appropriate to go into some debt to gain ballot access (though I instinctually think that it’s not a good move), but for the purposes of this problem let’s assume that there is some upper limit on what we should spend for some amount of ballot access. It would be silly not to spend $100 to gain access in California (population forty million), and it would also be silly to spend $100,000,000 to gain access in Wyoming (population six hundred thousand).
Another thing I’ll point out at the beginning is that the whole equation will have to be multiplied by some probability that the ballot access campaign will not work out. Despite the best laid plans, these things do fall apart for strange reasons sometimes, so spending some amount of money for a ballot access campaign gives you a shot at having access in that case, not a guarantee. That is also likely somewhat complicated by the fact that the more money you spend on a campaign, the more likely it is to not have some strange failure occur. The equation is already looking complicated.
The basic approach I’ve used when I’ve been daydreaming about this is that the whole thing could take the form of putting all of the benefits of ballot access on one side of the scale, and putting the alternative uses of the money and volunteer time on the other side, so that it looks like this:
if
(percentage chance of drive success)(benefits of having access) > (alternative uses of time and money)
then attempt the ballot access drive
There are some good things and some bad things about thinking about it this way, and you might decide to go in a completely different direction when coming up with a solution, or partial solution, to this problem. I am very open to this not being the proper framework to think about the puzzle.
But let’s go ahead and start working on the details of this, even if it turns out to be a dead end. We should start narrowing down our three different variables to see if we can get in the ballpark of something that seems reasonable.
For the first variable, the percentage chance of random failure, I simply don’t know. There are two people in the world I can think of who might be able to give an approximation of a general answer to that question: Richard Winger and Bill Redpath. And if you ask them, they’ll probably start off the sentence with, “it depends…” If you don’t ask those two people, it’s probably just a question mark.
If somebody has access to some comprehensive data set of every ballot access attempt, what was spent on it, what the requirements were, and what the result was, that person might be able to give you a reasonable estimation of what any given drive’s likelihood of failure would be. You could also get a more rough estimate by looking at every drive we’ve attempted and what happened with it, and in that way get a par success rate. We’re going to be off by some amount, but the more precise we can get, the better decisions we can make.
And the most accurate number is unlikely to be just some simple decimal, like 0.17. It’s more likely to be some amount, per dollar spent, per valid signature requirement. For example, if these things blow up 5% of the time when you only spend the bare minimum, and you need 1000 signatures to get on the ballot in Delaware or wherever, and signatures are going for $5 per signature, and you could spend $5000 on the drive, the probability of failure might look like 0.05 X 1000/5000, which would work out to a 1% chance of random failure. Or something like that. These numbers are probably way off, but it seems like that’s a reasonable way to think about it. Having said that, maybe it’s not a good way to think about it! If you don’t participate in figuring this out we’ll continue to be in error.
Now let’s go to the second variable, the benefits of having ballot access. From what I’ve heard from other people, these are the main ones:
1. Advertising to voters about the libertarian message and the existence of the LP
2. Local party growth effects
3. The ability to run winnable local races under the LP banner
4. The prestige of 50 states plus D.C.
If there are others, add them to the list. I’ll tackle them in reverse order.
4. I don’t think there’s a bonus we get by having 50 state ballot access that is significantly different from having 49 state ballot access. The increment between 49 and 50 is one, not some other number. If there is an extra bonus from collecting them all, I don’t know where to find evidence for it.
3. It is certainly beneficial to the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement in general to have elected Libertarians actually implementing freedom. There are a significant number of us who think that that’s our whole purpose. But how do we quantify that good?
I’ve started trying to figure that out by going through a list of elected Libertarians and giving them “influence points” for getting elected to city councils, county boards, and state legislatures, but honestly that project hasn’t really helped me to find an answer to the question of how much benefit that adds to our project as a whole. In the end, it might be our most ephemeral result. How do you quantify the good that Dick Randolph did in 1978 by getting elected to the Alaska legislature and abolishing their income tax? My answer of “8,778 Liberty points” is not satisfying, and also not really helpful in figuring out how much Alaska’s ballot access was worth to us in 1978. A lot? Yeah. How much? I don’t know.
2. Local party growth effects is probably easier to calculate. We have membership numbers for each state in the Libertarian Party here:
https://mywikis-wiki-media.s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com/lpedia/NatMemReport_States1975-2017.pdf
and also here https://lpedia.org/wiki/National_Party_Membership_Reports
All we have to do from this point is find all the instances of states that lost presidential ballot access in any year, look at what happened to membership in that state, and then compare it to states which didn’t lose ballot access. A good place to find info on which states have had ballot access is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_States)#Presidential_ballot_access
I haven’t run the numbers yet, but that’s a fairly easy project to do. We could find an actual number of members lost in states which lose ballot access. Multiply by average donation per member, and you get the dollar amount lost. Money lost from donations is far from the only impact that losing membership has, but the benefit from having ballot access in that state is at least that much.
1. Which brings us to the biggest and most important benefit of having ballot access. There is just no better way to advertise libertarian ideas and the Libertarian Party than a presidential campaign. Many fine books about the libertarian philosophy were written before 1972, but the movement as a whole only started taking off after we started running presidential candidates. If it were not for Ed Clark, Ron Paul, and Gary Johnson, maybe about 10% of the people who currently call themselves libertarians would use that word, or know it at all.
It’s hard to put a price on that when you consider the movement as a whole, but it’s easier if you break it down into little pieces. We’ve had 14 campaigns in 51 states/D.C. That’s 714 units, whatever you want to call them. Of those 714 units, we had ballot access in 616 of them, and we did not in 98.
About 86% of the time since 1972 people have been able to vote for a Libertarian president, and that meshes pretty well with the percentage of politically inclined people I talk to who already know what a Libertarian is.
And what’s that ultimately worth? Just like the impact of elected Libertarians, the results are hard to quantify. In this case we’re building up potential energy more than we’re making a direct impact, moving the Overton window slightly in our direction every time someone hears our message from one of our candidates, or every time a “quiet libertarian” expresses an opinion to a neighbor.
It’s easy to underestimate our impact. For every active Libertarian who shows up to meetings or runs for office, there are maybe about nine Libertarians who donate to the LP. For every Libertarian who donates, there are about 46 libertarians who vote for our presidential candidate. So about 410 consistent Libertarian voters, give or take, for every one committed activist.
Does that analysis help us to give us the proper amount of weight to this benefit when we’re trying to determine whether it’s worth our time and money? Maybe a little. Every time we have a state without ballot access, some fraction of the American voting population there isn’t going to hear our message, and some fraction of those who would have heard it would, in one way or another, have moved us toward liberty.
If we take the population of a state where ballot access is being considered and multiply it by some fraction, maybe 0.0001, we can add that into the benefits section in a way that’s proportional to local party growth effects and elected Libertarian influence. Again, that fraction is almost certainly wrong, and it’s also possible that we should calculate this benefit in some completely different way.
OK, that part’s done. Now let’s look at our third variable, which is alternative uses for the time and money we put into ballot access.
What else do we spend our money on, anyway? The big expenses that we typically have in any given 4 year period are that we put on two conventions (which might or might not bring in more money than they cost us), we spend money on fundraising, and we keep the basic functions of an office going, whether we have a physical office or not. We have also done other kinds of outreach to the public, but that’s historically been a very small fraction of what we spend. We have almost never spent money to promote a candidate other than a presidential candidate, and we used to send out LP News, but no longer. Finally, we usually have some amount of money put aside as a reserve to pay our bills if there’s an emergency.
We also spend money on lawsuits. I’m going to keep that function out of the discussion, because I think it might be more useful to go out to the backyard and set our money on fire than to sue other Libertarians.
If one of the legitimate functions is better funded than usual, what’s the concrete result? The short answer is, for the most part, I don’t know. I’m hoping you know. If we spend more money on putting on a convention, does that convention raise more money overall, or are there other benefits? The various members of the Convention Oversight Committees from the past few years might be good people to ask about that.
An experiment is going on right now to see what happens if we supercharge our fundraising activities, called Project Archimedes. We’ll have concrete and measurable results from that going forward, and that should make it pretty easy to plug into our decision making process.
What are the concrete results if we spend more on backend or office activities? That’s another thing that I don’t know, but I’m hoping to put together a roundtable of every former Executive Director we’ve had over the last 30 years to answer exactly that question. That stream will, I hope, happen on Youtube sometime in February or March of next year. Don’t let that stop you from working on that part of the question if it’s your area of expertise though.
In the “everything else” category of alternative uses for our money, I think we should be fairly skeptical of most new uses of our money. Extraordinary schemes require extraordinary evidence. At some point, when we’re really rich, I think we should start directly supporting candidates again. Not now though.
What about alternative uses of time? From what I can gather, volunteers are a chaos factor in ballot access drives. Sometimes they come through in amazing ways (thanks Chris Thrasher!) and sometimes they promise a lot and deliver very little. It’s wonderful and heroic when they come through, but it’s not something we should usually depend on.
Another problem of putting alternative uses of volunteer time into the balance is that it assumes that other uses of volunteer time would actually be spent on libertarian activities. Personally, on those days when I’ve gathered signatures, if I was not outside the post office with a clipboard I would probably have been playing video games. The story is different for candidates for office, who would presumably be knocking on doors asking for votes instead of at the farmer’s market asking for signatures. Volunteer burnout is certainly a factor to consider too, but I’m not sure how.
My inclination is that we shouldn’t factor volunteer time into the calculation as long as the demands on volunteer time are going to be mild and reasonable. For any effort that will take extreme volunteer resources, we should treat volunteer time and effort in a similar way as if we were paying for it.
Last in this very long challenge, I’d like to take up the question of debt. You can disagree with me here if you want, because maybe I’m wrong.
Without going into the whole saga, debt from chasing ballot access has gotten us into significant trouble before. At the end of the 1980 campaign the Libertarian Party was about $202,000 in debt, and it took us three years until we were finally free of our first brush with bankruptcy, vowing that we would never make that mistake again. One year later, in 1984, we did indeed make that mistake again when we went into $40,000 of debt chasing ballot access. We were in the process of paying it off slowly when Randy ver Hagen became national chair in early 1985. He freaked out over our financial situation, fired our National Director (who had been doing an excellent job) and ended most functions of the national office. As far as I can tell, it was that event, even more than the 1983 convention, which caused the near death of the national party in 1985-86. Our net worth remained negative through at least 1987, and our vendors and employees were paid inconsistently during those years.
That’s all ancient history now, but I’ve noticed the same pattern repeating over the years. So if we’re ever tempted to go into debt for ballot access, remember to put some amount of national LP dysfunction on the other side of the calculation from the benefits we’ll receive.
Whew.
After all of this analysis, are we any closer to being able to tell how much is an appropriate amount to pay for ballot access drives in the future? Yes, a little, but there’s still more work to do.
Like I said at the beginning, this is a challenge for you to take up. Tackle the part of it that you can, and chew on these problems in some of your spare time. The closer we get toward good answers, the better decisions we’ll make in the future.
Challenge questions for you:
Is the basic approach in this article the correct way to decide how much to spend on ballot access?
How do we calculate the probability of failure of any effort?
Is there any benefit to having 50 state access that is out of proportion to 49 state access?
How do we accurately gauge the impact of elected Libertarians compared to other outcomes?
What is the local party building impact of having vs not having ballot access?
How do we accurately gauge the general advertising impact of presidential ballot access?
What happens if we spend more money on conventions?
What happens if we spend more money on fundraising?
What happens if we spend more money on back office things?
What happens if we spend more money on other stuff?
How should we factor in volunteer time?
How much dysfunction does debt cause, and what amount of it should we tolerate for access?
Walter, that was 1990, not 1992
It should be pointed out that while the Libertarian Party has gotten its presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states plus DC in 1980, 1992, 1996, 2016 and 2020, and in 2000 it got its official ticket of Harry Browne/Art Olivier on the ballot in 49 states plus DC, but a faction fight in the LP of Arizona led to the faction which controlled ballot access putting the ticket of L. Neil Smith/Vin Supernowicz on the ballot instead, so the LP did have 50 state plus DC ballot access in 2000 for a presidential ticket, it just had a different ticket on the ballot in Arizona, the Libertarian Party has never been an official recognized political party in all 50 states plus DC, as in the party has always had to put its presidential ticket on the ballot in some states as independents/non-partisans, and some states which have a petition process which allows unrecognized political parties to place a presidentiap candidates on the pallot with a party label of a political party which is not officially recognized by the state government.
The Libertarian Party has never gotten a statewide, or districtwide in the case of DC, candidate on the ballot in every state plus DC in a non-presidential year election.
Well, the non-Presidential elections do not all happen in the same year, but your idea is clear.
Yes, a small handful of states have some statewide offices up in odd years and I was aware of this before I made the above post. My point remains alid that even taking this into consideration the Libertarian Party has never had statewide and districtwide (in the case of DC) candidates on the ballot in all 50 states plus DC in a non-presidential election cycle.
I am glad you posted this challenge.
In 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark was on the ballot in 50 states, the city of Washington DC, and the US territory of Guam. Ballot access in 50 states in 1980 was the first time since 1916 an alternative party presidential candidate was on the ballot of every state eligible. The result of such an achievement? The campaign received in contributions $3.5 million, received 921,128 votes (1.9%) a record that lasted until 2012, aired 47 five minute commercials, many radio commercials, Spanish language radio commercials, and full page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. As well as coverage in Newsweek, The Nation, The Progressive, Libertarian Review, National Review, Mutual Broadcasting, ABC, Next magazine, People, Hustler, and other media.
Achieving ballot access in 50 states, Washington DC, and Guam made Ed Clark a legitimate alternative party presidential candidate.
According to the Ed Clark and David Koch report on the 1980 Campaign:
“The Clark Steering Committee approved an all-out effort in January, after the campaign had gotten a strong indication that ballot status could be achieved in Maryland, which had been previously considered to be in the “impossible” category. The decision was based on the following bases:
1. The conviction that, given enough time and money, no state was truly “impossible”;
2. The belief that nationwide ballot status would be an essential element in future credibility both within the party and within the news media and outside observers’
3. The belief that ballot status was essential to the building of party organizations in states with little or no prior organization, and that to forego this opportunity would be detrimental to the party as a whole. ”
The report asks, “Was it worth it?”
“Absolutely! Achieving ballot access in every state was was well worth the effort and expense. . . 50-state ballot status built external credibility with news media and political in a way that 46 or 47-state ballot access never would have done.”
And finally the report makes it clear 50 state ballot access should be a given. The report states, “Total nationwide ballot status, then, should be regarded as a “given” a political position that should be which there is no excuse to loose.”
In a fundraising letter written by Chris Hocker to supporters he wrote, “If , after reading this letter, you’re not sure whether or not you want to contribute, I urge you to remember the establishment politicians, the news media, and the opinion makers are betting that we won’t make it. What’s more, most of them are hoping that we won’t make it – they’re happy with the system the way it is, and the last thing they want is Ed Clark proving that the Libertarian Party is truly a national movement and the wave of the future. We have a chance right now to beat them with their own rules – to meet their status of ballot status in all 50 states but we must move immediately and decisively, or we can not move at all. Thousands of people have already made their commitment -won’t you please make yours?”
My view is that ballot access should be a core value of the Libertarian Party and our presidential candidates at minimum should be on the ballot in 50 states, Washington DC, and Guam. There is no excuse for Chase Oliver not to have made the ballot in 50 states, Washington DC, and Guam. To be on the ballot in Guam a presidential candidate form has to be filled out and turned in to the electoral commission. This was not done and thus Chase Oliver was not on the ballot. (All that has to be done is to fill out a form and turn it in. Think about how easy this is.) To be on the ballot in Tennessee requires 270 (Only 270 – should not be hard to do.) registered voters to have signed a petition. Not enough valid signatures were turned in and thus Chase Oliver was not on the ballot.
I plane to propose at next years national convention a resolution that states ballot access in 50 states, Washington DC, and Guam for our presidential candidates is a core value of the Libertarian party.
More to come . . .
In my earlier response to Meh, I proposed that the national party have different funds for contributors to vote with their dollars for what they want There should be such a fund just for Presidential ballot access.
Keep in mind that we were on the ballot in all 50 states in 1980 because our Vice Presidential candidate, David Koch, made it happen by voting with his own money.
Some of the money political parties have is because people support that party and whatever all it does, and some is because they support some specific project or projects that is being pitched by its fundraising. For whatever reasons good or bad some of your party donors like to donate to ballot access specifically and it’s wrong to presume that money would be available for any other priority you come up with. Additionally, some people won’t donate to a party which is not on the ballot wherever they personally happen to live, while others take a more national view. I didn’t read the article and comments in sufficient detail to see how much these fact(or)s were already discussed but I didn’t notice any mention of them in the parts I read.
Excellent point. The party should have different funds for contributors with different interests or priorities.
When folks do strategic thinking, they often try to be “objective” by relying on “statistics.” In doing this, they minimize one of the most powerful, and most difficult to assess, elements in strategic success: LEADERSHIP. Consider the current conflict in the Ukraine: by every statistical measure, the Russians should be winning: they have the population, the equipment, the industrial capacity, and the natural resources. Yet, they have been fought to a virtual stalemate. Why? Their military leadership sucks. Their officer corps is made up of sycophants and ideological geldings, who often refer tactical decisions to higher-ups, who got THEIR positions by being sycophants and ideological geldings before them.
I don’t claim to be a military genius, but I was in the National Guard for a while. One of the key things that the US military tries to do is encourage leadership among the middle managers. They expect company commanders and NCO’s to TAKE THE INITIATIVE in the heat of a live-fire conflict.
IMO, the LP has to do something similar. They need to encourage state parties to TAKE THE INITIATIVE, in finding good candidates, and give them financial and operational support to get on the ballot, and run campaigns. What the national party needs to do is identify the state parties that are doing this and provide them with logistical assistance when and where it is mutually beneficial.
Walter, Russian equipment also sucks. Russian understanding of logistics would embarrass a good girl scout troop. Also, the Russians view taking the initiative as a punishable offense for junior officers let alone NCOs.
You are right about the LNC. Its recent leadership could not have been more damaging if it had deliberately sabotaged the party.
My point is that a lot of folks just look at the numbers on paper and think that Russia has the advantage.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
Before I delve futher into this, it should be pointed out that on average that the Libertarian spends less money on ballot access than any other group. I say this as somebody who has over 25 years of experience in ballot access and as a person who has been reading campaign finance reports for the Libertarian Party and for other political parties, candidates, ballot initiative, referendums and recall campaigns for many years. This includes Democrats and Republicans as they have to petition to get on primary ballots in a lot of states plus they have to pay filing fees to get on primary ballots in a lot of states. Even though I would say that the Libertarian Party has never run ballot access in what I would call the most optimal manner, it still for the most part does run ballot access in a more effecient manner than any other group.
It should also be pointed out that out of the field of alternative political parties, the Libertarian Party has been the overall champion of ballot access for quite a long time.
In the 2020 election part of the reason thay LP presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen got over 1.865 million votes is because she was on the ballot in all 50 states plus DC, and nobody else in the field of minor party and independent presidential candidates even came close to this. Her closest competitor was Howie Hawkins of the Green Party who got on the ballot in 30 states. Below this all of the other minor party and independent presidential candidates were on 18 ballots or less There were 17 states where Jo Jorgensen was the only alternative presidential candidate on the ballot, which is the most states where a Libertarian Party candidate was the only alternative candidate on the ballot in the history of the Libertarian Party..
IMO, Andy is spot on. Even now, the LP does significantly better with comparative ballot access than just about anyone else, including Democrats and Republicans. Even in my very-blue Massachusetts the candidates of the dominant Democratic Party spend a LOT to get on the primary ballot.
And, speaking of Massachusetts, whenever the Presidential primary is held, there are a LOT of candidates of every qualified party on the primary ballot. Why? Because it is the policy of the state here NOT to allow any candidate to ignore Massachusetts and skip the primary. Sooooo, if any candidate tries to skip the primary, it is the power not only of the state party chairmen, but also the State Secretary, to put all known candidates for President on the ballot, whether they request it, or not. So, whenever the LP has qualified ballot status in Massachusetts, there are even quite a few Libertarians listed. This is actually one of the FEW definite benefits having major party status in Massachusetts because, even in Presidential election years, ALL the down ballot candidates must petition to get on the primary ballot, and ALL of them are restricted to getting signatures only from voters registered Libertarian or Unenrolled (aka independent)
Dude, you’re asking the wrong people. Send your manifesto to the LNC.
PS: Mr. Winger has a very valid point.
The people reading this will likely elect the next LNC. Their opinions matter. Therefore Rowlette is speaking to the right people. As the last half-decade has shown, giving advice to the LNC is an exercise in futility.
I probably made this too long. In the future I’ll try to be less… comprehensive.
Tom Rowlette, your article doesn’t seem to discuss efforts to change bad ballot access lawsuits by lobbying. We have got more ballot access improvements since 1985 than we have by lawsuits. Libertarians have persuaded state legislatures to ease ballot access laws since 1985 in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. We have saved tens of millions of dollars by that activity. We should be doing a lot more of it now.
That’s true. About what proportion of our ballot access efforts over the next three years should go to lobbying?
About what proportion of our ballot access efforts over the next three years should go to lobbying?
In Alabama, at least, most of it.
In the almost-three years I’ve been here, I’ve discovered that this state is rather backwards on a lot of things election-related:
– No party registration.
– A strange mix of major party and minor party status depending on the level of government and race.
– Elections (and almost everything else!) run by probate judges and not county clerks.
– Very limited absentee voting.
– No citizen initiative or referendum.
– Counties have to seek permission from the state to change local laws.
– A ridiculously-long state constitution that has to be changed for some of those county laws (and some municipal ones, too!).
A couple of years ago the LPAL went all-in to try to get the 20% needed in a statewide race to get statewide major party status. They earned 18%. But Madison County (Huntsville) has major party status for its races. Go figure that out.
In this state, the laws need to be changed, but that’s a very tough nut to crack with the Democrats being effectively a permanent minority and Republicans being effectively a permanent corruption (the reverse of California) with a senile governor and clueless Congressional representation, and way too many Alabamians stuck in their cults of Churchtianity/Republican theocracy and Alabama football.
But we’re trying to build an effective party organization, and we’re getting there slowly; it takes time. The hardest part is knowing who our people are to work with, and the laws aren’t helpful on that.
And, don’t forget by initiative petition. Here in Massachusetts, it was HORRENDOUSLY difficult for independent and third party candidates to get on the ballot until a small, brave band of local activists put Question 4 on the ballot in 1992, which significantly reduced some of the harshest ballot requirements.