We note first that discriminating as to which financially burdened candidates may waive the verification fee is not necessary to demonstrating a modicum of support. The interest in avoiding voter confusion is adequately furthered by
section 103.021(3)'s requirement that minor-party candidates submit signatures of one percent of the registered voters.
See Libertarian Party, 710 F.2d at 794 (three-percent-signature requirement for statewide office). Second, it is constitutionally impermissible for a state to measure a party's level of support by the state of its finances.
See Clements, 457 U.S. at 964, 102 S.Ct. at 2844. A state might permissibly charge a nondiscriminatory fee that advances the regulatory interest of reimbursing the state for its election expenses, particularly if it offers alternative avenues of ballot access, but it cannot use the fee to decide who deserves to be on the ballot. Third, even if it were permissible to measure support in such a way, a party's ability to pay a verification fee is not rationally related to whether that party has a modicum of support. “Economic status is not a measure of a prospective candidate's qualifications to hold elective office, and a filing fee alone is an inadequate test of whether a candidacy is serious or spurious.”
Id. As the district court explained in
Clean–Up '84, which invalidated the fee-waiver provision as it then applied to deny the fee-waiver option to organizations proposing ballot initiatives: