From My Book Funding Liberty.
In 1996, there was a small Libertarian activist group in Worcester. Our candidate for State Representative missed getting on the ballot through a fluke. His erstwhile Democratic opponent, Representative Binienda, was, nonetheless, annoyed by our candidate’s efforts to run for office. He rammed a bill through the state legislature doubling the number of signatures required to get a Libertarian on the ballot, at least so long as we were a Major Party. After 1996, it would be even more difficult to get a candidate on the ballot under major party rules.
In 1994-1995, I was also involved in new local Libertarian groups in Worcester and Wales, Massachusetts. The Wales group, the Pioneer Valley Libertarian Association founded by John Brickner and friends, prospered and is now the oldest continuously-existing Libertarian political group in Massachusetts. The Worcester group faded away after the 1996 election.
In 1996, I was elected to the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts state board. I was busy with my Senate campaign. Early in the year the Party newsletter stopped appearing. In retrospect, the newsletter’s
irregularity seriously damaged my ballot access drive. Email was far less effective in 1996 than it is now. Most Party members had no idea that I had a ballot access drive. Despite my work load, I put together the second issue of a revived newsletter. I supported Ken Peterson when he was willing to become editor. I outsourced printing and distribution of the newsletter, sharply reducing costs and restoring monthly regularity of printing and mailing.
Eastern Dominance of Massachusetts Libertarian Organizations
In late 1996, the State Board debated whether the State Party should join the National Party’s Unified Membership Plan (UMP). Under this plan: State and party membership became one. The state party received $1/month or more for each member. The National Party collected all dues and donations and kept most of the donation money. The plan cost us almost all donations that arrived as part of the membership renewal check. Our nominal membership would be greatly increased if we joined UMP. However, the new state party members would be long-time national party members residing in Massachusetts who had regularly been invited to join the state party, and who had equally regularly declined. We would be gaining new members who were not interested in what we did. UMP bureaucratic centralization was also inconsistent with our Party philosophy. The majority of the Board favored the UMP, so we joined. The then-editor of the state newsletter, Ken Peterson, resigned in protest. The loudest exponent of joining the UMP soon ceased to be active in the state party organization.
At the end of my term, I was busy with local organizing issues. I declined nomination for re-election to the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts state board. It was clear that most LAMA board members had particular ideas about the directions in which they wished to move, directions that to my eyes appeared ill-advised. I thought it would be better if the LAMA board were filled by people who enthusiastically supported a consistent set of directions. I also had other projects. In years since, there have been suggestions that I resigned from the state board over the UMP decision. I did not resign; I served out my term.
The 1998 elections were approaching. Having run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1996, I committed to running for Congress in 1998. I knew what I had done in 1996, and saw how to correct my problems. Fortunately, given Massachusetts’ strange ballot access statutes, after 1996 we managed to purge ourselves of Major Party Status. To file 2000 valid signatures while we were a Party Designation rather than a Major Party I only needed to collect about 3000 raw signatures. I hired professional petitioners to collect that number [thanks to volunteers, I actually got more than 3000 signatures]. The signatures were collected in early 1998, validated, and delivered to the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office in May. That was a petitioning drive under the Party Designation rules. We’ll see in a bit what happened to Libertarian Jim Fredrickson when he tried to run for Congress in 2001 under the Major Party rules.
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