When they go to vote for president on Election Day, Florida voters are likely to find something funny about their ballots.

Well, make that someone funny.

Roseanne Barr, the comedian and 1990s sitcom star, will be one of 12 presidential candidates on the list, thanks to Florida’s weak ballot access rules.

The Socialist Party, the Objectivist Party and Barr’s Peace and Freedom Party will be among the minor political parties offering choices alongside the Republicans and Democrats.

“Florida will have the second-most crowded presidential ballot,” said Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News.

Only Colorado, with 17 total candidates, will have more, Winger said. Contrast that with Oklahoma, where voters will likely find just two candidates on the ballot, unless Libertarian Gary Johnson wins his lawsuit to get added to the field.

The long list of candidates for Florida has roots in the 1998 election, when state voters passed a constitutional amendment to assure minor party candidates have fair access to the ballot. The state was barred from passing any rule to block minor party candidates that doesn’t also apply to the two major parties. So to be on the ballot, a party only has to hold a national convention, be on the ballot in at least one other state and submit a list of registered Florida voters who will serve as electors to the Electoral College.

It was a hurdle Barr cleared easily. In January, the Peace and Freedom Party created a national party and in August a state chapter to assure Florida would be one of just three states to recognize Barr and running mate Cindy Sheehan as legitimate contenders. While the party is just a month old in Florida, it’s been around in California since the 1960s, when it was formed as part of the anti-Vietnam War effort.

Now, the party, with a platform calling for legalizing marijuana and gay marriage, proudly declares itself as “California’s feminist socialist party.”

“I’m here to tell the voters: if you want to tell the government and the two domineering parties that you’re sick and tired of all their evil, register in the Peace and Freedom Party and vote for me and Cindy,” Barr said in a statement to the media this summer.

Peta Lindsey, presidential nominee for the Party for Socialism and Liberation; Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party of Florida and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party of Florida have similarly found success in getting on Florida’s ballot when most states have refused them.

The easy access may not last much longer. After a record 13 candidates reached the ballot in 2008, the Florida Legislature began considering rule changes. As part of the election reform bill passed in 2011, Florida now requires a party be recognized by the Federal Election Commission as a national party and have a list of officers. If not recognized as a national party, a minor party candidate would have to submit more than 100,000 signatures from registered voters in Florida to get on the ballot.

But minor party political candidates have successfully blocked the rules from being enforced this year because it would have knocked candidates off the ballot who had already qualified under the old rule. Those rules now will not go into effect until the next presidential election cycle in 2016.

Legislators who passed the law say only serious contenders should be on the ballot.

“It just makes a long ballot even longer, which discourages voting,” State Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, said of the state’s liberal ballot access rules for president.

Some worry the list of candidates could affect the election outcome. Some Republicans already have begun to raise concerns that Johnson, the Libertarian candidate and New Mexico’s former governor, and Constitution Party candidate Goode, a former Republican congressman, could siphon just enough votes from GOP nominee Mitt Romney to give Florida to President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Some Democrats are still convinced a similar scenario happened in 2000, when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader pulled votes from Democrat Al Gore in the disputed Florida election that went to President George W. Bush.

But Winger said the theory of minor party candidates taking votes from bigger party candidates just doesn’t hold up. He said the media makes more of the concept than it actually happens. He said smaller party candidates might take some votes from the major candidates, but not enough to affect the outcome.

“It’s really a wash,” Winger said.