HARRISBURG, Pa. – Every third party or independent candidate who filed for statewide office this year has been removed from the ballot in a blatant display of intimidation. Organizers from several political parties and voter rights organizations held a press conference, August 23, to explain what happened and why.

Attending were: state Sen. Mike Folmer; Bonita Hoke of the League of Women Voters; David Jahn of the Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition; Gil Freedman of Common Cause Pennsylvania; VotePA Executive Director Mark Kuznik; Democracy Rising PA President Tim Potts; Libertarian Party of Pa. Chair Mik Robertson; Constitution Party National Chair Jim Clymer; Green Party of Pa. representative Bob Small; as well as Libertarian Party nominees for governor, Marakay Rogers, and lieutenant governor, Kat Vallelay, both of whom were removed from the ballot.

The press conference is available online on the Pennslyvania Cable News website. Look for Campaign 2010 in the menu and scroll down to “Ballot Access”.

Ralph Nader was removed from the 2004 Pa. ballot after a legal challenge to his petitions. That year, a step was taken which was unprecedented in any state. Nader was ordered to pay the cost of the challenge which removed him from the ballot, adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. Since then, this tactic has routinely been used to remove third party and independent candidates from the ballot.

According to Rogers, on the second day of her attempt to validate her signatures against the state voter registration database, Republican Party lawyers approached her with a grim message. If she did not stop trying to prove her signatures valid by later that day, they would seek to impose thousands of dollars in fines, should she ultimately lose the challenge. By this means, she and every other third party or independent candidate for statewide office was successfully intimidated into forfeiting their legal right to due process.

“The imposition of exorbitant fees for candidates who are unsuccessful in the defense against a challenge adds yet another layer of deterrence to participation in the electoral process,” Robertson said.

Current Pennsylvania law “falls short of the free and equal elections provisions of our state constitution,” Jahn said. “These people will stop at nothing to remove good, decent people from the primary or general elections.”

This year, the Democratic and Republican Parties were required by law to collect only 2,500 signatures while third party candidates for the same office needed 20,000 signatures, Vallelay said. Even the 20,000 figure is unusually low — in 2006 the requirement for the same offices was 67,000.

Current Pennsylvania law uses a “complex mathematical formula” that produces widely varying and unfair requirements for alternative candidates, Sen. Folmer said.

Folmer is the primary sponsor of state Senate Bill 252, the Voters Choice Act, which would have Pennsylvania use the same standard as Delaware, a simple formula based on the number of registered voters in the state. According to Folmer, the issue of ballot access “isn’t rocket science” and reform is needed to “protect the constitutional rights of citizens.”

The League of Women Voters believes the requirements for all candidates should be equal, and it was unfair to deny access to the ballot to candidates “who lack the resources to defend their candidacy,” Hoke said. The League is concerned about reduced voter participation, which Hoke said can be traced to “a lack of meaningful choices on the ballot.”

On top of such disparities, signatures can be invalidated for trivial reasons such as a voter writing “Jeff” instead of “Jefferey” or failing to put the year when dating their signature. “It’s a truly sad state of affairs when so many of our soldiers have died in recent actions that have brought ballot choices to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan while so much effort is put into limiting the choices that voters have in Pennsylvania,” Robertson said when describing the overall situation.

“These acts of intimidation are unacceptable at best,” said Christina Tobin, founder and chair of The Free and Equal Elections Foundation. “Pennsylvania’s ballot access laws are in serious need of reform and Free and Equal will continue to fight for the rights of voters in Pennsylvania and nationwide to have the choices they want to see on their ballots.”