Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "RFK Fails To Get On ANY Ballots As Independent Candidate | The Kyle Kulinski Show" video.

I didn't know the requirements in my country (Netherlands) so I looked them up. Apparently you need to make a one time deposit (the first time you enter) of 11250 Euros and you need 600 declarations of support from potential voters, evenly distributed across the country. That's it. So there is some treshold to keep the trolls out but all-in-all it is pretty accessible. We had 26 parties running in the last elections :-).
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@MikeYeary You would not need money for ads, a website would do. The government traditionally provides a couple of minutes on public television to present your party. The bigger parties still run some ads of their own but it is far from the circus seen in the US. The culture is more like if you want to know the nitty gritty of a particular party you download the program and read. Most people don't of course but it will be there for you. Journalists read programs and interview candidates and inform the public, it is less sensation oriented. Although we are "catching up" a bit in that respect 😕.
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@andytraiger4079 Every party has a program, a manifest which is publicly available. Parties are also supposed to have their ambitions reviewed bij "de rekenkamer", an institution that does calculations to assess if plans are financially feasible, if the numbers add up (it makes no sense to plan to spend more money on everything and also cut taxes for instance). Polititians can still score points with smart soundbites but if they do not align with their programs they will likely be ridiculed in the media. Most voters will have a coarse idea of what parties are close to their posittion on subjects they deem important so it is not like everyone needs to read all programs. And most parties are long time participants, every 4 years some new ones pop up and some existing ones lose support to the point they no longer make the treshold for a single seat in parliament.
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@ratatatuff Lots of parties were "elected", as in "got seats in parliament". And indeed a pretty awful one got more seats than ever. They got just under 25% of the vote which caused quite a stir. It will be hard to form a government with a majority coalition.
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@kjhuang Voting is organized in districts. One needs a certain minimum support declarations in each of those districts (at least 20 in each of the 30 districts).
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