Wyoming's presidential ballots

As you hopefully already know (especially since it was in last Tuesday's paper), Wyoming has five presidential candidates on the ballot.

They are:

-John McCain / Sarah Palin - Republican Party
-Barack Obama / Joe Biden - Democratic Party
-Bob Barr / Wayne Root - Libertarian Party
-Ralph Nader / Matt Gonzalez - Independent
-Chuck Baldwin / Dick Castle - Constitution Party

The Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties are all major parties in Wyoming and thus automatically get their nominees on the ballot, but Nader and Baldwin had to qualify through the independent signature-gathering process. It takes 3,868 sigs to get on the ballot in Wyoming. Those can only come from registered voters - and a voter can only sign for one candidate in each race.

Some numbers that political geeks like myself find interesting:

Nader turned in 437 pages of signatures, and Baldwin turned in 394. Each page has slots for 20 signatures, which would yield a maximum of 8,740 and 7,880, respectively.

State Elections Director Peggy Nighswonger said both candidates had loads of unregistered voters on their petitions. So, the Secretary of State's office had to process 6,709 Baldwin signatures to come up with 3,973 valid ones. With Nader, the state processed 8,424 sigs and accepted 3,962.

Nighswonger said at least part of the reason it took Nader more signatures to reach the threshold is because Baldwin turned in his signatures first. Some voters signed petitions for both candidates - so, on the first-come, first-serve basis, the overlapping signatures only counted for Baldwin's campaign.

That's probably more than you wanted to know about ballot access - especially since throwing out the number of Nader petition signatures isn't all that great of a party trick.