It Takes Too Much to Become an Independent Presidential Candidate

Let's say you decide you want to run for president in the United States. It's a job that is supposed to be open to anyone who wants to try. So, a reasonable first question to ask is what do you have to do and when do you have to do it. Well, you have to find out what fifty-one different set of requirements for getting on the ballot are! You could just identify the most important states but that would allow you to miss some votes -- possibly okay. If you decide that not hitting all states is okay you could apply strategies for choosing the states to ignore such as identifying the states with the least likelihood of making an impact and then you need to identify all the different criteria that could cause one to have more or less impact such as how the electoral college is selected, how likely the population is to go for an independent, how likely they are to go for an independent with you values and qualifications. So, yes, there are ways for minimizing the cost. But, no matter how much you work toward minimizing the impact of selective state balloting, the main stream candidates will have the advantage.

In this election year in which barely half of each of the republicans and democrats support the chosen candidate one would think that there is finally ample room for an independent such as Michael Bloomberg to enter the race with a true possibility of winning. The problem is that an independent doesn't have the party machine behind him/her to help understand and achieve ballot status in the individual states. It seems to me that given the lowered costs of communication and increased availability of national level media, and idependent candidate for president should be able to find in a central cite a set of criteria to meet for achieving balloting status and, upon meeting that criteria, be placed on the ballot of every state.

The criteria could very well be a combination of all criteria from the 50 states and Puerto Rico. The required date for declaring could be the earliest of all the states. My issue is not with the fact that there are a lot of criteria but rather that centralizing this information would allow independents to run on a more even footing with party candidates. If we don't do something along these lines the only other solution would be to create a third party called the "independent" party, that essentially did this job. But that would not achieve the same objective of leaving the race truly open to all who meet the qualifications and can muster enough support to get on the ballot.