Well, I was very pleased to see, when I went downstairs to vote (one of the luxuries of living in a big high-rise building is that our polling place is in our lobby!) this afternoon, that "Libertarian (where applicable)" was an option on the ballot selection form. In Illinois you can request any party's ballot, without having to be be "registered" as that party, so you tick off on this form which one you want. This time it went Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and "independent", with the latter, I guess,featuring stuff like water boards and judicial retentions. Since I'd already determined that there was no Libertarian primary in my legislative district, I took the Republican ballot, which is much simpler than the Democratic one, since many of the local races go uncontested by the Republicans (it's hard to work up a campaign for city or county gig when you know ahead of time that it's going to go 9-1 Democratic!), unless some up-and-coming lawyer is looking to build name recognition for a later state-wide run.
It's too bad that it's so hard to get ballot access here. In the last election cycle the Libertarian Party of Illinois and Libertarian Party of Chicago worked very hard to get us in as many races as possible (in Illinois a 3rd party has to get something like 20x the number of signatures of the established parties, and then those signatures can be thrown out by a partisan official, without said official having to provide any more reason than that he decided to invalidate them!). Once on the ballot, as long as the candidate gets a certain percent of the vote (I forget the figure), the party is "certified" for that district in the next election. We ran at least 3 candidates for Congress the last time around who hit that percentage. With the Republicans writing off Cook County, it would be nice to be able to run Libertarians in those races, if for nothing else to provide an "other" for people wanting to make a protest vote, and in the process get people used to seeing "Libertarian" on the general elections ballot.
Oh, well, it was a pleasant surprise to see the party as an option today!
