Carla Howell

Carla Howell (born 1955) is an American politician, small government advocate and activist. She was the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts candidate for Massachusetts State Auditor in 1998, U.S. Senate in 2000, and Governor in 2002. She then served in multiple leadership positions in the U.S. Libertarian Party. She has also organized tax-cut initiative ballot measures in Massachusetts and worked for the Libertarian National Committee.

Early life and education Howell is the daughter of Carla and Charles Howell, the third of their five children. She is a great-granddaughter of William Eustis Russell, a former governor of Massachusetts. Her father worked as a business executive, and her mother engaged in volunteer work in the community. As a result of her father's work, the family left Massachusetts. She attended high school in Detroit and Pittsburgh, graduating from Fox Chapel High School in Pittsburgh at age 16.

She attended Bethany College in West Virginia for mathematics and computer science, and after graduating, became a systems engineer at Westinghouse Electric. She began work at Computervision in 1981 and became the head of an engineering division in 1984. After a decade of engineering work, she then became a consultant in the Boston area for the high-tech and health care industry.

Political career Howell joined the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts in 1994 and was elected chair of the state party three years later. She received 102,198 votes, 5.3 percent of the total, which according to the Associated Press, "guarantee the party's official status." She had raised almost $700,000 by October, while Robinson had raised about $20,000. At the time of her campaign, she was the chair of the Committee For Small Government. She and other minor candidates were not included in a gubernatorial candidate debate, and their requests for an injunction were denied.

She was the executive director of the Libertarian Party of the United States during the 2012 election. She worked as its political director in 2016. She was a staff member in the Libertarian National Committee from December 2011 until June 2017.

Ballot initiatives Howell spearheaded initiatives to repeal the Massachusetts state personal income tax in 2002 and 2008. She sponsored 2002 Statewide Ballot Question 1, an initiative petition to end the income tax in Massachusetts. The measure received 45% of the vote, which Peter DeMarco, writing for the Boston Globe, described as "eye-popping". as Statewide Ballot Question 1. The 2008 initiative differed from the 2002 initiative in that it provided a one-year transition period with a tax rate of 2.65% before the tax rate would drop to zero. This measure received only received 30%, but had a higher raw vote total than in 2002.

She filed four petitions in 2010 to create ballot measures to reduce sales taxes, and Republican Christy Mihos, who was running for Massachusetts governor at the time, also sponsored the initiatives. Her group collected and submitted 74,131 approved voter signatures in 2009, and another 14,023 signatures in 2010 to qualify the measure. The measure polled as high as 56%, but was unsuccessful.