State questions new party’s legal standing; federal judge to issue ruling on law’s constitutionality within 30 days.

By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Unless the Moderate Party of Rhode Island can get on the ballot as a party in time for the 2010 elections, a lawyer for the group argued in U.S. District Court Thursday, it will be left at a constitutional disadvantage compared with Republicans and Democrats.

The state argued that the Moderate Party is too new and too small to meet the threshold to even have standing to bring the suit, with Assistant Attorney General Thomas Palombo asserting that the group is little more than a Web site and “a few people sitting around a coffee table in Barrington,” where founder Ken Block lives.
Judge William Smith, who questioned both attorneys during their final arguments, promised to make a decision within 30 days on whether he will declare part of Rhode Island’s ballot access law unconstitutional.
During a three and a half hour trial, Block testified on how he came to establish and build the party from a letter to the editor about his frustration about paying higher taxes than he would have to if his home and business were in Massachusetts. He concluded that “it was a political problem that caused it, to a movement that has signed up nearly 600 interested voters and has held fundraisers and supported candidates in last year’s election.”
The Moderates maintain that Rhode Island’s twin rules that to get official recognition a party must gather valid signatures equivalent to five percent of the number of voters in the recent presidential election year — with the huge turnout in 2008, that amounts to just under 23,600 — and that they can not even start collecting those names until Jan. 1 of next year, is an unconstitutionally high barrier for a new party to be forced to meet.
ACLU Attorney Mark Freel, representing the Moderates, told the court that there are significant advantages to a party being recognized in a year before an election, including fundraising and recruiting candidates who can be sure they are affiliating with a party that will be on the ballot come election time.
After the hearing, Block told reporters that the judge got to the nub of the issue when he observed, “it seems the system is set up so a party can’t focus on the General Assembly as Mr. Block wants to focus,” because all the benchmarks are set to presidential or gubernatorial elections.
“That’s the crux of the issue,” Block said, because the General Assembly writes the election laws “and the Democratic Party owns the General Assembly.”
Freel added that the system “is currently based on propagating (ballot access) from election cycle to election cycle” by having a candidate for governor or president who gets 5 percent of the vote.
“But how do you get there in the first place?” he asked.
Block testified that to garner the more than 23,000 valid signatures needed for recognition, the party would likely have to collect about 35,000 “raw signatures” that would then be vetted by local boards of canvassers to make sure the signers are registered to vote and still live at the address where they are registered.
He noted that as an unrecognized party that can only operate as a political action committee, the Moderates can accept only $1,000 from any single donor and spend only $1,000 on any single candidates. Recognized political parties, on the other hand, can raise up to $10,000 from any individual and can spend as much as it likes to support any candidate.
Palombo suggested during the trial that the Moderate Party could gain its official recognition by running a candidate for governor next year who gets at least 5 percent of the vote. But Block and Freel noted that would ace them out of General Assembly races in 2010.
“There is no way for us to participate in this election that allows us to compete on a level playing field with the Democratic and Republican parties.
Forcing a party to get on the ballot by a particular candidate receiving 5 percent of the vote or more, leaves that party beholden to “the limited shelf life of one person,” citing Robert Healey who put the Cool Moose Party on the ballot after the 1994 gubernatorial race, H. Ross Perot who won ballot status for the Reform Party after the 1992 presidential race and Ralph Nader, who did the same for the Green Party after the 1996 presidential contest.
Acknowledging that the state has “a stringent petition statute, Palombo argued that a party needs “a preliminary showing of a significant modicum of support. Mr. Block and the Moderate Party do not have that.”