California's Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, after announcing on Tuesday, January 31, that the Peace and Freedom Party was ineligible for all state ballots in 2006, reversed himself the following Friday. Facing certain defeat if he was challenged in court, McPherson declared at a February 3 news conference in front of his office that Peace and Freedom was qualified to field candidates in the 2006 primaries and beyond after all.
McPherson's miscue started as a right-wing power play, but ended up making him look like the biggest fool since Dan Quayle spelled "potatoe."
Asked in a phone interview whether the party was now on or off 2006 state ballots, Peace and Freedom's State Chairperson Kevin Akin replied, "We're on. It's the Secretary of State who's a little bit off."
The reason McPherson gave for taking Peace and Freedom off the ballot was that the party's registered membership is less than one percent of the number of the state's eligible voters.
"That's irrelevant," Akin said. "The law says one-fifteenth of one percent is all that's required for a party to stay on the ballot once it's qualified. The Secretary of State was engaging in a bit of malicious partisanship."
"Monday afternoon," Akin says, "at quarter to five, we got a phone message telling us to call a clerk in the Secretary of State's office, Dierdre Avent. She told me Secretary McPherson was going to issue a press release announcing that we'd been taken off the ballot, and that she'd been forbidden to connect us with anyone else such as someone in the State Department's legal division to discuss the matter.
"However, our lawyer Bob Evans was able to talk to someone in McPherson's legal division, and that person gave one interpretation of the law, while someone else in the very same legal division spoke to the aide of a state senator and give a conflicting version."
McPherson's initial contention was that because Peace and Freedom was not on the state's ballots in 2002, after having been dropped in 1998, their candidates (or maybe, un-candidates) had received less than two percent of the vote, rendering the party ineligible until such time as they re-established themselves by having enough registered members to make up at least one percent of the state's total number of eligible voters.
"It was then," Akin continues, "that we concluded that this was a malicious partisan attack rather than a mere incompetent fumble. We called members of the press on Friday morning notifying them of a press conference in front of McPherson's office at two p.m., and McPherson's office was inundated with calls asking why the rules for ballot qualification had suddenly changed."
Shortly before the press conference, an unidentified aide from McPherson's office called the Peace and Freedom Party's lawyer, Bob Evans, and told him 'You're on the ballot.'"
Asked whether McPherson admitted having made a mistake, Akin replied, "He still insists on a plainly wrong interpretation of law, but says because previous Secretaries of State mistakenly allowed non-qualified party candidates on the state ballot, he is forced by precedent to follow the same practice."
Asked why McPherson has such a strong dislike of the Peace and Freedom Party, Akin said, "He's an extreme right-winger, and was appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger."
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