On August 18, the New Mexico Attorney General filed this 37-page brief in response to the ballot access lawsuit Woodruff v Herrera, filed by the Libertarian and Green Parties on May 7.

The parties had complained that, starting in 2006, the Secretary of State began omitting a straight-ticket device for the qualified minor parties, even while continuing to place a straight-ticket device on the ballot for the Democrats and Republicans. The Attorney General’s response to this is to skirt the issue entirely, and instead to defend the practice of not using a straight-ticket device for independent candidates.

Another strong complaint from the parties is that the Secretary of State refuses to furnish the parties with the blank petition forms, so they could be circulating the petition to re-qualify the parties. The Attorney General again side-steps that issue, but talking as though the complaint were about the failure of the Secretary of State to furnish the separate petition blanks for candidates. New Mexico requires one petition to qualify the party and then completely separate petitions for each of the party’s nominees, and the Attorney General’s brief ignores the party petitions.

New Mexico is in the 10th circuit, and the 10th circuit already ruled that candidates for Congress need not be registered voters. The parties complained about New Mexico’s law that requires all candidates to be registered voters. The Attorney General handled that by alleging that the 10th circuit opinion, Campbell v Davidson, only applies to independent candidates. Since the 10th circuit opinion was based on the wide-ranging principle that states cannot add to the constitutional qualifications to run for Congress, the Attorney General’s interpretation of Campbell v Davidson seems unduly narrow.