How do you actually get on a WI election ballot?

It’s one thing to declare you’re running for office — it’s another to qualify to be an official candidate. Here’s how it’s done.

Anybody can say that they are a candidate for office — it’s another thing entirely to do the work to actually get on a ballot.

We’ve all seen campaign announcements. There might be a podium, some balloons, a doting family, and some enthusiastic supporters. But a verbal declaration is not enough as some wannabe candidates have learned the hard way.

The true path involves paperwork, with the most important document being a nominating petition and a bunch of signatures from people like you.

Nominating petitions and signatures

In many cases, petitions are designed to make a point. They’re passed around by people who want to gather enough signatures to demonstrate strong public demand for whatever it is the petitioners are pitching. 

Other petitions are more functional — raising enough signatures to trigger a referendum or a recall election, as Wisconsin voters know too well. 

Nominating petitions don’t get the same attention, but they are a crucial part of each election cycle. A prospective candidate must collect enough valid signatures on a nominating petition and turn them in to the official for that particular election before a deadline. Different states have different benchmarks for ballot access. In particular, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has full information on its website. The commission office is where petitions are sent for state-level candidates, while local candidates might file their petitions with a county clerk, a school district office, or some other official.

In Wisconsin, the threshold number of signatures varies with the office. To run for governor,  you need to collect 2,000 signatures. For a seat in Congress, it’s 1,000 signatures. State Senate campaigns require 400 signatures, while Assembly campaigns require 200. In all cases, candidates try to gather up to twice as many signatures to offset the ones that might be challenged or struck down for various reasons (such as not living in the district, an incomplete address, or illegible handwriting).

At the local and legislative levels, you might have a candidate ringing your doorbell to ask for your signature and saying a few words about why they’re running. But with so many signatures needed at a statewide level, there’s a reason why you probably never saw Gov. Tony Evers or Sen. Ron Johnson on a street corner holding a clipboard to gather signatures. For those kinds of races, campaigns often have volunteers and staff who assist in collecting petitions. They’re known as petition circulators, and they have some strict rules to follow. Many a candidate’s hopes have been dashed because they counted on circulators who didn’t follow the rules, so the signatures they collected were ruled invalid, and it brought the candidate below the threshold to qualify for a spot on the ballot.

There’s also a new rule that circulators must be Wisconsin residents who are eligible to vote.

If you are asked to sign someone’s nominating petition, here are two things to keep in mind:

First, you must be a resident of that particular legislative or congressional district. And while you do not have to be registered to vote, you must be eligible.

Second, signing someone’s nominating petition does not mean you are promising to vote for that person. In fact, you don’t have to agree with that candidate about anything at all. You might want to help them get on the ballot just to vote against them later on! The nominating petition is a simple civic exercise that gives election campaigns their start.

Third, you can sign nominating petitions for multiple candidates, but only one candidate for each race. For example, you could sign the petition for an Assembly candidate, a county candidate, and one of the seven Democrats running for governor but not any of the other six after. (People have had their signatures removed from multiple candidates’ petitions because they mistakenly thought they were being helpful.) 

For fall candidates, nominating petitions can be circulated from April 15 to June 1 at 5:00 p.m. And that deadline of 5:00 p.m. is strict. Rapper Kanye West’s last-minute effort to get on the ballot for the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin failed because a staffer showed up with his petitions less than one minute after the deadline.

Other paperwork to start a campaign

While collecting enough signatures on nominating petitions is an important step, it’s not the only one. There are three more requirements for prospective candidates.

A declaration of candidacy form is what candidates fill out and sign to state the office they’re running for, their address, and stating they are qualified to run for office (not having a felony conviction, for example).

A candidate needs to form a committee, an entity responsible for collecting the campaign donations. And that group — Jane Doe for Governor, Friends of John Doe, etc. — needs to register with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission because it will be filing finance reports about donations and expenses. 

A statement of economic interests is where candidates list employers, business ownerships, large creditors, and other sources of income. It’s how voters can see whether a candidate has a potential conflict of interest by making decisions in office that financially benefit them personally.

These four types of ballot access documents are not the kind of thing a person thinks about when they express interest in running for office — and they might seem intimidating at first. But Wisconsin candidates have benefited from campaign managers, treasurers, and candidate training groups like Wisconsin Progress who already know or can get the answers to questions that help get the paperwork filed — allowing the candidate to focus on issues and strategy.

The Elections Commission has put together a series of videos called Elections 101 to explain ballot access, election administration, and election security.