Party On

In a follow-up to Monday's follow-up, Moderate Party of Rhode Island Chairman Ken Block now reports that the Board of Elections has provided him with signature petition forms. Now it's up to Block and his supporters to get 23,588 signatures from registered voters and get them certified by the board of canvassers of Rhode Island's 39 townships. With that accomplished, the MPRI will become one of the state's official political parties, and it can field candidates for the 2010 state elections.

Signature petition forms are now available at Block's business, Sympatico Software Systems, at 20 Altieri Way, #3 in Warwick, RI. Block will be throwing a petition party at Sympatico from 5 to 7 P.M. on Monday, June 15, where volunteers can pick up forms and celebrate the MPRI's legal victory. Further down the road, Block will be organizing his volunteers to collect signatures during the Fourth of July parade in Bristol. He figures if he can hit the streets with enough volunteers, he'll be able to get all 23,588 signatures that day.

So, if you'd like to help Ken Block launch his less-insane rival to the Rhode Island GOP, swing on over to his office in Warwick, pick up some forms, and go out and get those signatures. Because you can never have too many conservative political parties.

Signature Tune

In a follow-up to Saturday's post about the Moderate Party lawsuit, MPRI Chairman Ken Block writes about his meeting Monday morning with Board of Elections executive director Robert Kando. It turns out that the BoE is "re-designing" the signature collection forms, so the MPRI won't be able to start collecting those 23,500 signatures just yet. When will the re-design be complete? Kando didn't say. What's the procedure for redesigning the forms? There isn't one. The BoE will have to come up with some procedures . . . sometime. Then they can do the actual re-design . . . sometime.

If I were a cynical person, I might think that Kando's "form re-design" was just a shoddy ploy to delay the MPRI from collecting its signatures. But I am a stranger to cynicism, so I'll just assume that the Board of Elections has nothing better to do than re-design its various forms. If that's the case, then I've got a way for our cash-strapped state government to save some money: shut down the board of elections in odd-numbered years. Just think how much money the state would save if it only had to pay Robert Kando's salary every other year! I think I'll suggest this to my own state rep, Peter Martin, while I remind him about my views on marriage equality.

Meanwhile, Kando raised the possibility of appealing Judge Smith's decision. Ralph Mollis says State isn't planning to appeal the decision, but no word yet from Patrick Lynch whether the A.G.s office might do so.

Moderation Now!

Yesterday saw the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the RI chapter of the ACLU back in February on behalf of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island. US District Judge William Smith ruled that the state's law requiring that would-be political parties wait until an election year before gathering qualifying signatures was unconstitutional. Thus, the MPRI can start in right now to gather the 23,500 or so signatures they need to qualify as a political party. (The 23,500 number comes from another law requiring would-be parties to collect 5% of the voter turnout from the last election. Judge Smith ruled that this law was constitutional.)

The MPRI is the brainchild of Barrington business owner Ken Block, a small-government conservative who came to the conclusion that the GOP didn't really mean it when they claimed to favor small government. As a gander at their website shows, the Moderate Party of Rhode Island is only moderate compared to the modern Republican Party. They favor term limits for state legislators, a two-year term limit for the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate, stringent ethics rules, and general lowering of taxes and spending. Block writes, "The hot button social topics of our times (abortion, illegal immigration, etc) necessarily must take a legislative back seat while our economy is repaired and the erosion of the tax base reversed."

It was their need to pander to their base of religious zealots and xenophobes that led the Republican Party to put social topics front and center in the first place, and this has played an important role in their recent collapse here in New England. As I've mentioned before, I think Ken Block's MPRI has the potential to give Rhode Island Democrats a sane opposition party, so I welcome Judge Smith's decision. In fact, I'll even help Brock gather signatures, and as a registered voter I'll add my own Stephen Hopkins to his registration papers.

Good luck, Ken. I hope you make it.