Starting Up

So how do you start a political party?

A political party is just a bunch of people talking.  To really do anything, the people in the party must form an organization called a political committee.  A political committee is similar to a corporation, in that it is a separate entity from the people who are members of the committee.  The committee itself is a legal entity. 

O.k.  So how do you start a political committee?

First you have to figure out the kind of committee to start.  There are different kinds of political committees depending on what you are trying to do.  If you're trying to influence elections in a particular state, you would consult that state's department of elections to see how to form a state committee.  Since we are wanting to do things on a more national scale we would need to form a federal committee.

There are different kinds of federal committees.  At a high level:

• Regular party committees are for political parties
• Candidate committees are for people running for office
• Political action committees (PACs) are for organizations that are politically active but are not a candidate or political party.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulates committees that operate on the national level.  Once a political organization accepts $1,000 worth of donations or spends $1,000 in a given calendar year, the organization must file the committee organizing papers with the FEC.

Now you would think that we would want to start a regular party committee, since this whole idea is based on starting a political party.  However, the federal government won't actually recognize a committee as a political party until they have met certain requirements, such as winning federal elections.  So we would actually have to start as a political action committee (PAC).  One of the most important differences between a PAC and a regular party committee is the amounts of money they are allowed to give to candidates.  PAC's have much lower limits than regular party committees.  However, that should not affect our party too much because if this idea works it will work based on word of mouth and grassroots growth, not spending massive amounts of money.  In fact, the political money machine is what we're trying to fix.

O.k.  So how do you start a political action committee?

There are actually even different kinds of political action committees.  We would want to start a non-connected committee.  This basically means that we would not be connected to a corporation or any other committee.

There is a lot of good documentation on the FEC's website about how to start a non-connected committee.  They even publish a PDF guide that walks you through it step by step.  So we would have to follow the rules and laws set forth in that guide.

So where do we begin?

At a high-level, these are the steps, not necessarily in this order:

• Elect a chairman of the board, and other board members
• The chairman appoints a treasurer (and preferably an assistant treasurer)
• Establish bylaws by which the party and board will operate
• File the necessary paperwork with the FEC to establish the committee
• The treasurer opens one or more committee bank accounts
• The treasurer submits regular reports to the FEC regarding the income and expenditures of the committee

That sounds like a lot of work!

 Yes it does, and yes it is.  But that is what you have to do to be a serious political organization.  The good news is you don't have to do all of this until that $1,000 threshold is breached.  So there is time to lay the foundations of the party, build the website, etc., before you have to start reporting everything to the government.  Regardless though, there is going to have to be a core group of people that are dedicated to establishing the party and willing to put in a decent amount of work to get it off the ground.  People who don't have enough time or energy to be that committed can still be members of the party, but they won't be able to be very involved until the necessary organizational structure (including the website) is established by the core group.

So again, where do we begin?

The first step is getting a bunch of interested people together to discuss things, probably in a web conference setting since it's more convenient and people may be spread out geographically.  If you are interested in helping to start this party, or just interested in being a part of it, send an email to politimorph@gmail.com.