North Dakota held its primaries on June 12. Three parties were on the primary ballot, and voters were free to vote in any party’s primary, Republican, Democratic, or Libertarian. The Libertarian Party only had one candidate for statewide office, Roland Riemers. He was running for Secretary of State. The law requires winners of statewide primaries to receive at least 300 votes. If they don’t, they can’t appear on the November ballot.
Riemers was credited with only 247 votes, so he is not on the ballot in November. As a result, the Libertarian Party won’t be able to remain on the ballot as a qualified party after November 2018. The law requires the party to poll 5% for either Secretary of State or Attorney General this year. The 5% vote test must be met every two years, and now it cannot be met in 2018. To get back on the ballot for 2020, the party will need 7,000 signatures collected during 2019 or 2020.
All the statewide Libertarians in the 2016 and 2014 primaries received over 1,000 votes, and even in earlier years, always polled at least 500 primary votes. It may be that 2018 has the most polarized electorate in the United States in many years, and voters who in previous years were willing to vote for minor parties, this year are either highly motivated to vote Republican or Democratic, depending on whether they have passionate feelings either pro or con about President Donald Trump.
Ironically, a poll published June 21, which included in the Secretary of State’s race, showed Riemers getting 6% of the general election vote. The race is very unusual, because the Republican Party has no nominee, but the incumbent Secretary of State is running for re-election as an independent. The poll shows Jaeger leading with 51%, and the Democrat, Josh Boshee, at 32%. Assuming Jaeger is re-elected, he will be the first person elected Secretary of State as an independent in U.S. history.
Well, bummer!
These things are rigged. No matter how many signatures he had turned in, the Uniparty would have found him unqualified, unless his presence on the ballot would serve the interests of one of them. One more reason we must break — SMASH — the duopoly.
According to the LP website, Riemers was the only LP candidate running in North Dakota. I find that especially unfortunate, considering that North Dakota was, in 2016, Gary Johnson’s second best state. I also think this shows that it’s helpful to have candidates for more than one office in a system like this. Riermers apparently took the entire burden of ensuring that the LP remained qualified. If someone else had filed for a different office, then I can see some synergies at work here — someone may not know much about Reimers, but may know something about the other candidate, and that’s enough to get that person out to vote, and while that person is at it, they’ll vote for Reimers. It would have taken only 53 such individuals to get Reimers, or the other guy, over the threshold.
It seems to me that this is a big step backwards for the party. Now they have to get 7K signatures. It seems to me that is a tall order in a state with as small a population as North Dakota.
Yet another reason/example —
NO primaries.
—
PR and AppV
“It may be that 2018 has the most polarized electorate in the United States in many years, and voters who in previous years were willing to vote for minor parties, this year are either highly motivated to vote Republican or Democratic”
No excuses. This is a failure of the ND LP leadership. They failed to recruit more candidates. They failed to do even a 15 second GOTV campaign by giving a primary day reminder to their nearly 1,200 facebook followers. There was no mention of Roland Riemers on the ND LP facebook page all year, as far as I can tell. There was no mention of any 2018 candidate on the ND LP web site. And the national LP web site lists Riemers as already on the November ballot, with no mention of needing to pass a primary test, first. If a North Dakota voter had only scrolled down to June 12th on the candidate list, he would not have seen any LP candidates in ND to vote for.
The low turnout is the fault of the ND LP. Most libertarians probably didn’t even know they had a candidate on the ballot and so never bothered to vote in the primary. Taking just 15 seconds to make a facebook post would have avoided this problem.