With a bit of time on my hands, I trekked thru some of the web's holdings and came across the following site:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010409175640/http://ballot-access.org/1995/0824.html#08
Granted, it is somewhat dated, i.e., the 1996 election, but a scroll down thru the data contained on this site will give those of you who somehow think a third party candidacy is a cake walk, or that somehow rules can be easily bent or better, broken a view of what the real world is like.
Earlier this afternoon, there was an article posted about the Constitution Party in which the CP laid out many of the problems of ballot access........namely costs and time.
As I looked for info on Perot's campaign, a look in at a wiki article, shows that the Libertarian Party was on the ballot in all 50 states plus DC.......and they got a whopping 291,627 votes cast that year, or .28%. That's even less than the total population of many of America's cities.
The next highest 3rd party grabber was Bo Gritz, of the Populist Party with 106,152 votes, or .10%.
At the tailend of what was report was the Natural Law Party, newly formed, which was on the ballot in only 32 states and received a whopping 39,999 votes, or .04%........just a tad behind the U.S. Taxpayer's Party!
According to wiki, Perot was ahead for about 2 months in polls prior to his getting out of the race---he had 39% of the poll to Bush at 31% and Clinton at 25%. After being out for a few weeks and jumping back in, on election day he took 18.9%--that is, 19,743,821 votes out of the 104,423,923 cast. Spookdaddy had twice as many votes--39,104,550, or 37.4% of the total cast, with BJ taking 44,909,806, or 43%.
Perot sunk millions of his own dollars into his campaign. I believe I read where he was paying to rush thru the ballot access petitions.
You have to ask yourself how RP could have done that early on in the campaign race--early on being the key to assuring the time to seek signatures, etc.
Anyways, there is probably a lot more meat on this site that might open our minds to even more thoughts and ideas.