To the editor:
My party- the Libertarian Party of Florida — has encouraged me to run for Florida State Representative (District 79, here in Cape Coral). The suggestion is a reasonable one, I would think, since I was a State Representative in New Hampshire many years ago. (I served as chair of the NH House Appropriations subcommittee on Justice and then on the Committee of Conference on the NH State Operating Budget). However, the point of this letter is not about my candidacy.
I am writing to you to point out the preposterous filing fees that are required of candidates here in Florida. Effectively, they make running for office here into a plaything of the idle rich. Ordinary working stiffs (or retirees-on-a-budget, like me) are presented with a real impediment, right at the beginning. Specifically, the filing fee for a State Representative here is some $1,700. That’s more than my 2010 Jetta is worth. By way of contradistinction, the filing fee for NH State Representative was a princely TWO DOLLARS (or five signed petitions) in the 1970s and it still is.
I’m gonna pass around the hat to collect the filing fee. However, you should know that getting money out of Libertarians is not half as much fun as you might think. I suspect the same is true of Republicans or Democrats.
My point is this: New Hampshire doesn’t try to scare off people from running for office. Why does Florida? Who are you afraid of*? (See: Lubin v. Panish, 415 US 709 (1974))
Larry Gillis, Cape Coral
Director-at-Large
Libertarian Party of Florida