August 13, 2001

Now that Gov. George Ryan has decided not to run and the campaign has begun, the Libertarian Party of Illinois would like to bring attention to an important issue that is often overlooked. This issue is the unfair petition requirements for anyone other than a Republocrat to run for office.

We cannot let them get away with removing candidates from the ballot, like they did to Jim Tobin for governor in 1998. The Democrats and Republicans only need 5,000 valid signatures on petitions to be on the ballot for statewide offices. Third parties need 25,000 valid signatures.

Because of challenges to those petitions, a third party needs 50,000 signatures to be sure they will have enough to get on the ballot. The Republocrats will collect around 8,000.

But more than that, the Libertarians needed to organize hundreds of volunteer hours from all over the state to verify the validity of every single signature when the Republicans challenged us. State employees on the clock were among those challenging our petitions.

The intent of these petition challenges and unfair signature requirements written by the Republocrats is not to keep our ballots from being cluttered with candidates. The intent is to drain the resources of any third party that tries to run against them. Gov. Ryan and the State Board of Elections wanted to keep the Libertarians off because we are the conservative party in Illinois that believes in reducing the size of government. They knew in a close race we would take votes away from Gov. Ryan.

The Libertarian Party ran more than 1,430 candidates in the 2000 elections, twice as many as all other third parties combined. We fielded candidates for 255 of the 435 seats in the U.S. House as well as 25 of the 33 Senate seats up for election. Our slate of U.S. House candidates received 1.7 million votes, the first time any third party has received over a million votes.