John Kerry just qualified for secret service protection, according to reports. Which made me wonder, how do you qualify? I figured there must have been some system for it, they can’t just do it willy-nilly. And so Google comes to the rescue once again. A PDF file from the Senate web site gave the following information. A candidate can get secret service protection if s/he:

1. is a publicly declared candidate;
2. is actively campaigning nationally and is contesting at least 10 state primaries;
3. is pursuing the nomination of a qualified party (i.e., whose presidential candidate received at least 10% of the popular vote in the prior election);
4. has qualified for public matching funds of at least $100,000, and has raised at least $2 million in additional contributions; and;
5. as of April 1 of the election year, has received at least an average of five percent in individual candidate preferences in the most recent national opinion polls by ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, or has received at least 10% of the votes cast for all candidates in two same-day or consecutive primaries or caucuses.

Under special circumstances, secret service protection may still be granted to a candidate even if they haven’t met these requirements, but only if the Secretary of the Treasury agrees and gets clearance from a congressional committee. Usually, protection doesn’t begin before January.

I believe the candidate also has to request it.

I find a few points in there interesting. For example, the fact that your party has to have won 10% of the popular vote in the last election–that kind of narrows it down to the Republicans and Democrats, although the Reform Party could have qualified at one point (Perot got 19% in the 1992 election), but Libertarians, Greens and others need not apply. I guess you have to limit it somewhere so that you don’t have to waste highly-trained personnel on every crackpot who registers (not to mention the legitimacy it provides); it just surprises me that they went this far. I guess Congress must have decided at some point, and there are, after all, not too many Libertarians, Greens or Populists in there. And the polls are interesting too–only the major TV networks? What about the print media? And when did CNN get added? Though I suppose for all of those points, if there really were a serious candidate who didn’t qualify on all five points, I doubt that Congress would really deny them the protection.

On a side note, I read that in 1988, Kerry made a bit of a joke concerning the secret service. He is reported to have said, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”

Then, after the laughs died down, “There isn’t any press here, is there?.