Thanks to legal pressure, Maine’s Legislature last year made it easier for minor party candidates to claim a spot on the ballot. Small parties can allow unenrolled voters to sign their candidates’ petitions.

Though it appears few Green Independent or Libertarian candidates are taking advantage of this yet, their parties have. The change likely means Maine voters will have more choice in future elections.

Historically, collecting the required signatures for nominating petitions was the hardest thing for small political parties to do.

Would-be politicians aligned with a minor party now have just as good a shot at gathering the required signatures from voters as anyone else seeking to appear on the ballot.

Lisa Savage, a well-known Green who ran for Senate in 2020, tried to get the signatures for her party that year and gave up when she couldn’t collect enough under the rules requiring 2,000 registered Green Party members to sign the paperwork. 

 “We were going nowhere,” said Sam Pfeifle of Gray, one of Savage’s aides in the 2020 race, who called the old system “almost impossible” for Greens.

Savage ran as an independent in the end, which was a much easier route to the ballot. When I reached her last week, she said she wasn’t familiar with the new rules but was “glad to hear they will no longer disfavor third-party candidates. Hooray!”

The necessity for reform came in the wake of a 2021 federal court decision by U.S. District Judge Lance Walker, who gave the state’s former procedure for getting on the ballot a thumbs-down.

In the past, if you were a Green Party member who wanted to run for the state Legislature, you needed to get 25 signatures. Simple, right? Well, no — because the old rule mandated that all of the signers had to come from other registered Greens, who make up a small fraction of the electorate in every district in Maine.

A Green hopeful may have needed, in some cases, to get 25 of fewer than 100 Greens in a district to sign a nominating petition. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans who needed 25 signatures were drawing from pools of more than 1,000 voters.

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows explained to lawmakers last year that the new law allows any qualified party to notify her office by the end of the year preceding a primary that they want to allow unenrolled voters to sign nominating petitions for their candidates in the following year. Both the Greens and Libertarians have already done just that.

Almost inevitably, that’s going to lead to more minor party candidates and, possibly, more minor parties. Their candidates, after all, will no longer be shut off by narrow rules clearly intended to keep them off the ballot altogether.

Pfeifle, who is running this year unenrolled for a state House seat, told me recently that having the ability to get signatures from unenrolled voters “opens up a huge door” for minor party hopefuls.

The revision isn’t likely to transform the political landscape quickly. After all, Pfeifle said, “It’s not such a great time for trying to organize people in general.”

But it is a small victory for democracy, something worth cherishing in these times.