Some independent candidates start their own political parties to ease ballot access

Running for president isn't easy when you aren't part of one of the major political parties.

While Democrats and Republicans don't have to petition a state to appear on a ballot, independent and many third-party candidates do.

Running as an independent candidate can be particularly difficult because of high signature requirements — often on short timelines. And some states even limit which voters candidates can get signatures from.

For example, an independent candidate seeking a spot on Texas' 2024 ballot has about two months to gather 113,151 signatures of registered voters "who did not vote in the presidential primary of either party," according to state election officials.

There is a workaround to these kinds of rules, though: A candidate can start their own political party and run as a member of that party.

That's because states such as Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas make it significantly easier to get on the ballot as a minor-party candidate, compared with running as an independent candidate.

As a result, presidential candidates like anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and progressive scholar Cornel West have decided to create their own political parties — the We the People party and the Justice for All Party, respectively — to get on the ballot in some states.

This month, the Kennedy campaign announced it had gathered enough signatures to put his We the People party on North Carolina's ballot this year.

In North Carolina, a political party only needs to gather more than 13,000 signatures of voters to get on the ballot. To run as an independent candidate in 2024, though, campaigns need to gather more than 83,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot.

West initially