On August 15, the Democratic National Committee met and approved rules for its 2028 presidential primaries and caucuses. The DNC will accept the use of ranked choice voting. The Rules Committee last month had decided not to accept RCV, but the full Committee reversed that decision.
On August 14, the New Mexico Secretary of State filed this brief in defense of the state’s ballot access laws for minor parties. New Mexico Forward Party v Toulouse Oliver, 1:26cv-2286. New Mexico is the only state that requires new parties to file one petition to qualify the party and then, after nominating candidates in a convention, requires each nominee to submit his or her own separate petition. The state’s brief denies this, but does not name any other state with such a double-petitioning requirement.
Each statewide nominee needs 14,246 signatures. If the party had nominated for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, each of the two needs his or her own separate petition; they can’t both be on the same petition, even though they are elected as a team in the general election.
If the Forward Party can’t succeed in winning injunctive relief, New Mexico will be one of only five or six states this year with a Democratic-Republican ballot monopoly for all the statewide offices. Two states this year, Utah and Washington, have no statewide offices up. The other monopoly states are Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana (unless a lawsuit wins), maybe North Dakota, and Virginia. New York has four parties on the ballot but the two minor parties don’t have their own separate nominees for all the statewide offices.
New Mexico’s brief says the state is in danger of having a crowded ballot without its nominee petitions, but its only two examples have nothing to do with nominee petitions. New Mexico cites the 1972 Democratic U.S. Senate primary when 25 candidates were on the ballot, but that was because a court had invalidated the filing fees that year, and at the time no petitions were needed for primary candidates. New Mexico also cites 1992, when there were ten presidential candidates on the general election ballot. But that is because the state let parties on the ballot that year that had not ever been required to submit any petition for either party status or for a nominee. The existing petition requirement for new parties (one-half of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote) had been created in 1989, but it wasn’t yet in effect.
Nowhere does New Mexico explain why it doesn’t require nominee petitions for minor party presidential candidates.
On August 13, Libertarian congressional nominee Lana Leguia filed a federal lawsuit against the New Jersey ban on out-of-state circulators in general elections. Leguia v Caldwell, 3:26cv-10263. Earlier she was kept off the ballot because she had used some out-of-state circulators. The New Jersey ban on out-of-state circulators for primary petitions had been declared unconstitutional in federal court in 2021, but the state courts refused to examine whether that decision also means that the ban for general election petitions should be disregarded.
The new federal case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee. He is the judge who enjoined the discriminatory ballot access format in primary elections in 2024.
Here is the Complaint in the new case.
A New Jersey state trial court will hear oral arguments on August 17 in a case over whether an independent candidate can be disqualified just because he received some write-in votes in a major party primary. See this story.
New Jersey is one of the few states that allows write-in votes, yet doesn’t have a procedure for a write-in declaration of candidacy. If New Jersey did have such a procedure, this type of lawsuit would not arise. The candidate is running for Brielle Borough Council, a partisan office. He argues that if an independent candidate is considered a “sore loser” just because people cast a write-in ballot for him in a party primary, no candidate would be safe. The candidate’s enemies could cast write-in votes for the candidate to sabotage him.
On August 11, the Florida Republican Party dropped its lawsuit that had been filed to remove Peter Jassenoff from the ballot. Jassenoff is the Libertarian nominee for U.S. House, 25th district. The Republican Party had sued the Secretary of State because the Secretary of State had allowed Jassenoff to run, even though he had paid his filing fee with a personal check instead of a check on a campaign bank account. Republican Party of Florida v Byrd, Leon County Circuit Court, 26-CA-1364.
