The Albuquerque Journal has op-ed by me, setting forth why the Libertarian Party does not need to have a gubernatorial nominee this year in New Mexico in order to retain its qualified major party status.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
The Albuquerque Journal has op-ed by me, setting forth why the Libertarian Party does not need to have a gubernatorial nominee this year in New Mexico in order to retain its qualified major party status.
Why do you think that the Libertarian Party will get 5% of the (gubernatorial) vote? Because of rolloff, the Libertarian candidate will need to get more than 5% of the vote for their office.
Each election is NEW.
Each office is totally SEPARATE from other offices.
Rolloff? I don’t know what that means.
@CO,
Most of the time, the top of the ballot office has the most votes cast. Some voters will not realize that you can vote for every office. Some will realize that you can, but will think that “I’ve never heard of these candidates,” because there were 10 million commercials for governor and senator, and one newspaper interview in a newspaper nobody reads where Question 1 was “What are the duties of the Commissioner for Obscure and Arcane Matters?”
If one million persons vote for governor and 950,000 vote in down-ballot races, then the rolloff is 5%.
The New Mexico statute says that a candidate for a major party must get 5% of the total gubernatorial vote. A Libertarian candidate who receives 5% of the vote for their office, may have less than 5% of the gubernatorial vote.
Gary Johnson got 9% of the vote in New Mexico, but he was a former governor from New Mexico, running against two personally dislike-able candidates from the Northeast (three if you include Jill Stein).
Rolloff = more NON-votes for lower offices —
which is why the Donkeys want to have/keep the party logo/symbol vote —
vote the Donkey logo/symbol = vote for ALL Donkeys on the ballot —
for MINDLESS/STUPID Donkey voters.
Jim Riley- Thanks for the explanation! In all my years of following politics I had never heard the term before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoilt_vote
Who was the first NON-voter — unhappy with the ballot choices ???
Richard: Why is this even an issue this year, given that the LP got 9% of the vote in New Mexico for President in 2016? Doesn’t that at least carry them through as a major party in NM until 2020?
@CO,
I think it may be a fairly new term, at least in widespread public use. It may have come up with the respect of the term ‘reverse rolloff’ which has been applied to the 2016 California senatorial race, and perhaps the 2016 presidential race, where voters deliberately skipped the top of the ballot race because they didn’t like the candidates.
It might have been cited in the Michigan straight-ticket case, where Democrats are concerned that voters won’t bother voting for every race.
If the straight-ticket device is used in New Mexico, it could be harmful to the Libertarian Party. Some voters will vote for minor party candidates for down-ballot races. They may be less likely to vote a Libertarian straight ticket for philosophical reasons, or because there is no gubernatorial candidate. Persons voting a Democratic or Republican straight ticket may have no clue what offices are being voted for.
In 2000, Al Gore, Jr. won New Mexico by 266 votes. While all the tumult was going on in Florida, there was a controversy in New Mexico regarding how straight-ticket votes should be counted in some counties. Eventually when it became clear that Florida would be decisive, they let the ballots be counted in New Mexico. In 2012, the straight-ticket was eliminated in New Mexico, with the SOS saying that if the legislature wanted it reinstated they could pass a law. Several bills have been introduced, none have been enacted. This year a different SOS says that she has the authority in making consistent ballots to add a straight-ticket device. My guess is the national Democratic Party is pushing her, and offering a legal defense.
The Tennessee case (which Richard Winger posted about yesterday) shows what can happen when the percentage is based on a gubernatorial vote. In Tennessee, passage of a constitutional amendment is based on the issue receiving a majority of the votes cast for governor. The idea is presumably to use the gubernatorial vote to measure the size of the electorate. But the effect was to give those who supported a measure an incentive to skip the governor’s race and only vote Yes on the ballot measure. There was at least an e-mail effort to encourage voters to do so, and more votes were cast for the ballot measure than for governor, in effect reverse roll off.
@JK,
I would read the statute as applying only to the next election. There is a separate test to maintain ballot qualified status, that does take into account the results for two successive elections. Oddly, that test /is/ based on the gubernatorial or presidential election, but only requires 1/2 of 1% support.
It appears that someone may have conflated the two statutes. There is a potential paradox, in that a party could be a major party, but not be ballot-qualified. They’d likely litigate that bridge if they came to it.
It is not necessarily an advantage to be a major party. If the Libertarian Party was a minor party, they could have nominated by convention, and no petition to get on the primary ballot would have been required.