Qualified New York political parties

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In New York State, to obtain automatic ballot access, a party must qualify every two years by receiving the greater of 130,000 votes or 2% of the vote in the previous gubernatorial election or presidential election.^[1] In years with a gubernatorial election or presidential election a party must run a gubernatorial candidate (as well as a lieutenant governor candidate, although the state will accept petitions without a lieutenant governor candidate if no other candidate challenges them) or a presidential candidate to be eligible for automatic ballot access; if 130,000 voters vote for that candidate on their party line, they have qualified the party for the next two years until the following presidential or gubernatorial general election whichever one comes first.^[2] A party that is not qualified may run candidates by completing a petition process. Parties are also allowed to cross-endorse candidates, whose votes are accumulated under electoral fusion, but any parties must cross-endorse both the governor and lieutenant governor candidates for fusion to apply. Parties that are already qualified must issue a Wilson Pakula authorization if they cross-endorse someone not enrolled in that party; there are no restrictions (other than that the candidate must be eligible for office) on who can be nominated on a non-qualified ballot line, as these lines are determined by filing petitions.

For statewide and special elections, automatic ballot access means that no petitions have to be filed to gain access to a ballot line, and party organizations can endorse candidates through their own conventions (this does not apply to legislative candidates, who still must petition onto the ballot regardless of party endorsement, but are only required to collect a third of the signatures required of non-qualified parties)^{[citation needed]}. Qualified parties also are the only parties eligible to hold primary elections in the state-run primary elections. In addition to determining whether they automatically qualify for the next four years, this also determines the order on the ballot; qualified parties are ranked in order of gubernatorial votes, with the party having the most votes atop the ballot.

The threshold for automatic ballot access was originally 50,000 votes every four years during the gubernatorial election. The current threshold was adopted in 2020 prior to the 2020 presidential election. The adoption of the current threshold has led to legal challenges from parties that qualified for automatic ballot access under the previous threshold but not the current one.^[3]

Parties that do not qualify automatically can petition their way onto the ballot. For statewide candidates, this requires 45,000 signatures, and requires 500 signatures in at least half of the congressional districts in the state.^[4] The Socialist Workers Party regularly used this approach to appear on the ballot before abandoning its ballot-access efforts in 2010, then stopped running statewide candidates entirely in 2018. These parties also are not eligible to run primaries, and the first person to submit 15,000 signatures automatically gets the party line. (Sam Sloan attempted to use this tactic to take the 2010 and 2014 Libertarian gubernatorial nominations from that party's nominee, this before the Libertarians gained ballot access in 2018, but failed for lack of signatures.)