I will adjudge my own campaign to be a total practical success if my gubernatorial running mate, Chris Garvey, and I achieve merely the 50,000 votes required by NYState law to gain for the Libertarian Party of New York an "official" status under the NY State election law.
Such official status would confer the following two benefits:
(1). Official status for the LPNY would guarantee that the candidate slates of the LPNY would be printed on the NYState ballot.
Currently a repetitive, exhaustive, costly, and seriously hampering effort is needed in each electoral season to collect the 15,000 signatures on a nominating petition that NYState law mandates for unofficial parties seeking ballot lines.
We Libertarans cannot readily communicate our message while we are simultaneously begging registered voters for signatures on a petition whose purpose is often difficult quickly to explain to those voters whom we must thus importune.
(2). Official status for the LPNY would enable the likely tens of thousands of "closet" libertarians in NYState to manifest their overall libertarian orientations by registering to vote as Libertarians.
The current situation is that most such people register instead as "Independents". This conceals the ideology of those people. It thus hides from the public the significant strength of libertarian feeling in NYState. It discourages the sizeable percentage of those people who hold the libertarian philosophy from participating in the electoral process at all, since the perpetuating obscurity of the LPNY leaves those citizens without hope of a real choice for them in NYState politics.
The discouragement of voters I have described as resulting from a sense of political powerlessness, is usually misinterpreted as constituting "voter apathy". This maintains and intensifies a misunderstanding about the disguised, obscured, often volcanic despair which underlies much of the politics of modern America.
The LPNY's attaining to official status in New York State would enfranchise for the first time a large silent constituency of despondent citizens of our state.
I hope that my remarks here have at least partially spoken to the concerns you expressed in your email to me.
I do hope that you will consider the Libertarian Party as a viable political option for yourself.
Best wishes.