I think it is funny that this story came to my attention today.

Evidently, the two states with the biggest state legislative’s staffs are New York (where people always say we have arcane election law, and unfair ballot access) and Pennsylvania. We know the drill in Pennsylvania…

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnist/ny_bloated_legislature_QrkhIVY5rKNT0yVzWr0WWL

Employing more than 2,700 people, New York’s Legislature has a larger staff than every other state but one (Pennsylvania). Florida, with nearly the same population, has a legislative staff of 1,570. Even California, twice New York’s size, has 650 fewer people on its Legislature’s payroll.

Should someone do a study and see if there are any comparisons, direct rations between size of a state’s legislative staff and “petition challenges” or “non-major party candidates on the ballot” or “ballot access overall”? Might be interesting.

1. It helps the bureaucrats advance up the career ladder

2. The love of power is the root of all evil

In the past, we have discovered that Republican Party operatives who were challenging Libertarian signatures in Illinois were in fact state workers, illegally doing political party work while on the clock, who worked in a building connected by an underground tunnel to the elections office.

Threatening to expose that little ploy, along with the Republicans’ preoccupation with their US Senate candidate’s sex scandal and the fact that their national convention was held too late to legally place their presidential candidate on the Illinois ballot, was how the Libertarians were able to be on the Illinois ballot in 2004. If the signatures had been challenged, we wouldn’t have had enough.