On August 26, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 2015 law that drastically increased the number of signatures needed for Libertarians to get on the Libertarian Party primary ballot. Here is the 8-page opinion in Graham v Tamburri, cv-16-143. As a result of the 2015 law, the Arizona Libertarian primary ballot of August 30, 2016, only has one Libertarian on the ballot for any partisan office.
The opinion says the state has an interest in making it more difficult for Libertarians to get on the party’s primary ballot, because the state has an interest in keeping candidates with little voter support from getting on the November ballot. The 2015 law increased the number of signatures needed for a statewide Libertarian from 133 signatures to 3,034 signatures. Only registered Libertarians and registered independents can sign a Libertarian primary petition.
The opinion says nothing at all about another Arizona law, 16-322.C, which says that a member of a qualified party that has been on the ballot for less than four years can get on his or her own party’s primary ballot with a petition of one-tenth of 1% of the number of votes received by the winning gubernatorial candidate in 2014. For 2016, that law requires 806 signatures.
The opinion fails to discuss the point that the Arizona Libertarian Party has already established that it itself has a modicum of voter support. It has been on the ballot continuously in Arizona since 1992. Therefore, logically, a Libertarian nominee does have a modicum of voter support, because he or she is supported by a group with a modicum of voter support.
The decision says nothing about the part of the 2015 bill that also drastically increased the number of write-in votes needed in a Libertarian primary for someone to be considered nominated. The disparty between the treatment of the Libertarian Party and of the Green Party is even more shocking for the write-in primary threshold. A member of the Green Party who files to be a write-in candidate in the Green Party primary can be nominated with just one write-in vote, whereas a Libertarian for statewide office this year needs 3,034 write-ins, and only registered Libertarians can cast such a vote.
In 2002, in Browne v Bayless, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s June independent presidential petition deadline. But in 2008, the Ninth Circuit ruled the June deadline unconstitutional. This shows that just because the Arizona Supreme Court upholds a ballot access restriction, that doesn’t mean a federal court can’t find the law unconstitutional. The Arizona Libertarian Party has a case pending in U.S. District Court on the same issue.
In the State Supreme Court case, the party’s U.S. Senate candidate, Frank Tamburri, filed 4,205 signatures, but a Republican, Robert Graham, challenged Tamburri’s Libertarian primary petition, and the challenge was upheld. That is why the State Supreme Court case lists the Libertarian candidate as the Defendant, not the Plaintiff.
I’m surprised that Bolick didn’t issue a dissenting opinion
The Fed and State courts are equally STUPID regarding EQUAL ballot access tests.
We should be getting the write-in results of yesterday’s Arizona primaries shortly. There were Libertarian candidates running write-in campaigns in every congressional district but one. There were Green candidates running write-in campaigns in about three of the congressional districts, and since they need only one vote, they should be nominated and appear on the November ballot. (It’s not clear what will happen if Gary Swing wins both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House primaries.) Assuming that the Libertarian write-in candidates do not meet the threshold despite getting many more votes than the Green candidates, the unfairness of the disparity will be clear for everyone to see.
In 2012, I won the Americans Elect party primary for Congress with a handful of write-in votes. I got 0.98% of the vote, lower than, I think, any Libertarian candidate for anything in Arizona. If the state’s interest is in keeping candidates with little support off the ballot, then the law that allowed me to be nominated is not in the state’s interest. (Bear in mind that the law that allows non-qualified parties to have write-in candidates win primaries with just one vote was put into effect following a federal judge’s ruling.)
P.S. The Arizona Libertarian Party has a closed primary, unlike every other party. Thus in 2012, my brother, an independent, could request an Americans Elect party ballot in the primary and write in my name. Yesterday, any of Arizona’s independents could request a Green Party ballot, but they could not request and receive a Libertarian Party ballot. The closed primary was the Libertarians’ choice.