2004 Elections How To Run Guide

What is here

This page focuses on all of the resources that are available to candidates and their campaigns.

Key Dates

Here are the key dates for candidates who are running for State Representative, State Senator, Governor's Council and County offices.

February 24	Last day for a person running in a state primary to enroll in a party or for a person running only in a state election to unenroll from a party except for newly registered voters.
April 27	5 p.m. Last day and hour for submitting nomination papers to local Registrars of Voters and Election Commissioners for certification of signatures.
May 25	5 p.m. Last day and hour for filing nomination papers (including party enrollment or voter registration certificate and Ethics Commission receipt) with the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

You can find more dates in the Secretary of the Commonwealth's Candidate’s Guide to the 2004 State Election or in the 2004 Massachusetts State Primary and State Election Schedule. These documents are in Adobe Acrobat format so you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Getting Started

All candidates should read the Secretary of the Commonwealth's Candidate’s Guide to the 2004 State Election. This has valuable information about getting on the ballot such as when nomination papers are due, how many signatures you will need to collect and how you must gather signatures to get on the ballot.

Raising and spending money

The Commonwealth's campaign finance laws allow you a limited degree of flexibility when it comes to starting things. If you want to keep things small and make a limited amount of small in-kind contributions to your campaign for things like photocopying nomination papers, all you need to do is file a CPF 101: Statement of Organization and keep track of the date of any in-kind contributions and their monetary value and purpose.

Once your campaign wants to accept contributions from others, you must open a bank account and follow state law in regards to campaign contributions. At all times you must follow state law in regards to campaign expenditures.

NOTE: The Green Party of the US has setup a Targeted Campaign Resources and Matching Funds Program. These programs provide help with fundraising and resources including special promotions on Green websites and in newsletters and mailings; special calls for volunteers or mobilization of volunteers to particular campaigns; and special fundraising efforts.

The Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) has makes available various guides and campaign finance kits for the candidates for a variety of offices. The Guides and many of the other documents are in Adobe Acrobat Format so you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them.

Office	Guide	Kit
State Representative	(Guide)	(Kit)
State Senate	(Guide)	(Kit)
Governor's Council	(Guide)	(Kit)
Local Office	(Guide)	(Kit)

We recommend that you contact the OCPF about how to setup your campaign account prior to setting up a bank account. You can reach them at (800) 462-OCPF during normal business hours.

NOTE: When filing government forms with any public agency, we recommend that you get a receipt for the completed form you gave them and store those forms in a safe place. Forms get lost accidentally, and if the government agency cannot find them then you could be fined or could fail to get on the ballot. Better safe than sorry.

To open a bank account, you will need to get a Taxpayer Id Number (TIN) from the IRS. Generally, this is a Employer Identification Number or EIN. Visit the IRS web site that talks about EINs to find out how to do so. Once you have the EIN, you can open a bank account.

Getting on the ballot

Your first resource should be the Candidate’s Guide to the 2004 State Election (listed above). It will tell you how many valid signatures you will need to collect to get on the ballot. Be sure to read the How to Run in a Party Primary section. The national party has a Ballot Access manual in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format that is also helpful when approaching getting on the ballot.

You can get your nomination papers from either the Commonwealth's Elections Division in Room 1705 of the McCormack Building at One Ashburton Place, Boston, MA 02108, or at the Elections Board of a city near you. They should give you enough nomination papers for three times the number of signatures and a copy of the Candidate’s Guide to the 2004 State Election.

Since Green-Rainbow and unenrolled voters are the only voters whose signatures count as valid, you should plan to gather at least twice as many raw signatures as valid signatures. Sometimes this is not enough, so be sure to get nomination papers into city and town offices and validated early so you can see how far off you are from your goal. Even then, be sure to collect more than the required number of valid signatures. Failure to do so will leave you vulnerable to a challenge by one of your opponents, and you could be illegible to be on the ballot as a result.

You must make sure that all fields on the nomination papers are filled out properly. Be sure to list your name as you are registered to vote, the address where you are registered to vote and your party as Green-Rainbow. Check with the Commonwealth's Elections Division, but we believe that offices and districts must be written out as such:

Office	Office Name	Example District Name
State House	Representative in General Court	Second Franklin District
State Senate	Senator in General Court	Franklin and Berkshire District
Governor's Council	Governor’s Councillor	Second District

All papers should the same term.

Each nomination paper is specific to a particular city or town, so be sure to fill out the city or town in the correct field on both sides of the nomination papers. Failure to do so could invalidate your nomination papers or leave them open to challenge.

We have put together a Guidelines for Collecting Signatures document that you can customize and give to the people gathering signatures for you.

All candidates must file a Statement of Financial Interests for Calendar Year 2003. You can file this either on-line or by printing out the forms and mailing them. If you file it on-line, then they must provide you with a login. Visit their new account page or visit the on-line page above and page down to find the link to their new account page. Be sure to file your ethics report early so you are not scrambling at the last minute.

Once you have gathered all of your nomination signatures, be sure to get them to the proper cities and towns so the signatures can be validated. Be sure to get a receipt for the nomination papers and keep the receipts in a safe place so you can bring them in so you can pick up the validated forms.

Once you have picked up the validated nomination papers and Certificate of Enrollment and have your recipt for filing your Statement of Financial Interests, bring all three types of documents to the Commonwealth's Election Division by May 24th. Failure to do so will prevent you from appearing on the ballot.

Other state resources

Candidates are entitled to get copies of the voters list for their district for the cities and towns in their district. Some cities and towns charge for copies of the list. Campaigns should contact the cities and towns in their district and ask what their policy is.

We recommend that you ask for digital copies of the lists. Having the voter list in a computer format allows you to search and organize the list as needed and is more flexible than having it in a paper format.

Resources from the Green-Rainbow Party

Any person who decides to circulate Green-Rainbow Party legislative nomination papers will be given:

Green-Rainbow Party literature and the Ten Key Values in English and Spanish (if appropriate) or other languages (if appropriate and available);
Trainings for candidates and volunteers;
A listing that they are running and their campaign’s contact information in party publications, such as our newsletter, email updates and web site;
Direct referrals from our clearinghouse;
Copies of the Green-Rainbow Party legislative platform and background material;
Voter registration cards as available from the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

Those who qualify for the ballot as a Green-Rainbow Party legislative candidates will be given the above items and:

Access to the party’s contributors list for fundraising purposes (in-kind);
Assistance in setting up a website with links to the Green-Rainbow Party website and the Party’s legislative platform (in-kind);
Equal inclusion in relevant press releases used to promote electoral activity within the Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts;
Demographic information about the district;
Information about opponents’ legislative voting record;
An opportunity to address our state committee meetings as a candidate.

We are in the process of designing a unified 2004 campaign site that will have space for candidates to have their own site and make it easy to setup a site. Until that happens, the stop gap solution is for you to id someone who can do at least rudimentary HTML coding and have you send a request and the person's contact info to candidates@green-rainbow.org.

The national party also has web site templates that you can use. Just check their Website Templates page.