Minor parties knocked off ballot

MAT-SU -- The 2002 governor's race may not have been as close as many people expected, but the popularity of Frank Murkowski and Fran Ulmer was strong enough to knock all four of Alaska's minor parties off the statewide ballot.

Alaska law uses voter turn-out at the governor's race every four years as a benchmark for maintaining a spot on statewide ballots. Get three percent of the ballots cast for governor and your party is officially recognized by the state. The flip-side of the rule also holds true. A party that fails to get three percent is no longer recognized by the state. A week ago, Alaskan voters -- apparently caught-up in the choice between Murkowski and Ulmer -- knocked the Alaska Independence Party, the Libertarians, the Republican Moderate party and the Green Party off the ballot. The parties now must use registration drives to achieve the three percent benchmark, which isn't set yet but will likely be around 6,000 voters when the remaining absentee and questioned ballots have been tallied.

Greens took the most votes of any minor party. As of last week, Green gubernatorial candidate Dianne Benson had 2,450 votes, a figure that came to 1.23 percent of the total.

Jim Sykes, a Green Party founder and candidate for U.S. Senate, said Alaskans shouldn't expect any of the four minor parties to disappear and that Greens have been considering whether or not to try and change the ballot status law.

"It's not a matter of the third party. There are six parties and none of them are going to go away," Sykes said last week.

It was Sykes' candidacy in for Governor in 1990 that first earned the Green Party a spot on the ballot. That year Sykes received 3.3 percent of the vote. In 1994 he ran again receiving 4.1 percent and in 1998, Green Party candidate Desa Jacobsson received 3.01 percent. A close governor's race isn't the only factor that hurt minor parties this year. The closed primary ballot also took its toll, according to Sykes, who said the Green Party saw both factors coming early on and has been working to beef its membership through registration drives.

"We ran up against the closed primary and we lost two or three hundred people," Sykes said. "We have since gotten them back, but it was not a good thing to have happen when you're right in the middle of a registration drive."

Sykes said the Greens are considering whether to push for a change in the three percent benchmark rule -- possibly through the court system -- on the grounds that it chooses the Governor's race arbitrarily instead of say, the race for U.S. House, or both U.S. Senate races or a formula that takes all three into account.

Sykes ran for Ted Stevens' U.S. Senate seat this election was the most popular of the Green's statewide candidates, with 7.21 percent of the votes so far.