On February 28, the Kentucky Libertarian Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Libertarian Party of Kentucky v Grimes, 16-1034. The issue is the state’s definition of “political party.” The only method to become a qualified party in Kentucky is to poll 2% of the vote for President. Thus, it is impossible for a group to ever become a qualified party in advance of any particular election, and it is impossible for it to become a qualified party in a midterm year, or an odd year.
The only other state with this characteristic is Washington.
It happens that the Kentucky Libertarian Party is now a qualified party, because it polled over 2% for President in November 2016, but that does not blunt the logic of the party’s complaint.
Since the party did get 2% in 2016, would that cause them to not have “standing” to sue? Even though the logic of the complaint is still true, they are no longer directly harmed by the rule.
Standing relates to whether the plaintiff had standing when the lawsuit was filed, which clearly the Kentucky Libertarian Party had. The state agrees that the party had standing. And ballot access constitutional cases do not become moot, generally, so the case is still a good one to settle for the future for all types of parties, not just the Libertarian Party.
In a certain way, such cases are better, because there is no immediate political fall-out. Similarly, when the US Supreme Court issued Anderson v Celebrezze in April 1983, that was a good relaxing time to settle the issue of early petition deadlines for independent candidates, because the Court knew the decision would not impact on any election that was at hand. By contrast, in Williams v Rhodes in 1968, the US Supreme Court had to act, to put George Wallace on the Ohio ballot, just before the general election of 1968. Also in McCarthy v Briscoe, the Court had to act on whether to put Eugene McCarthy on the Texas ballot just prior to the 1976 general election. The Court hates having to make decisions that might change the outcome of a presidential election.
Kentucky has no elections in 2017, and filing for 2018 does not start until November.
The state semi-recognizes the Libertarians in that they record the number of members. They also recognize the number of Green Party, Constitution Party, Socialist Workers Party, and Reform Party, whose membership doubled in Louisville last year (from 1 to 2). All others are listed as “Other,” who outnumber Independents. Most of those are actually independent who didn’t bother to change their registration when they were finally allowed to register as independent about a decade ago.