On June 19, the Massachusetts ACLU agreed to represent the Libertarian Party in court, over the failure of the Massachusetts Secretary of State to let the Libertarian Party substitute its actual presidential candidate, Bob Barr, for the party’s stand-in presidential candidate, George Phillies.
All the court precedents from other states concerning presidential and vice-presidential substitution are favorable. Furthermore, Massachusetts allowed vice-presidential substitution for John B. Anderson in 1980, and also told the Constitution Party in 1996 that presidential substitution is allowed. Massachusetts also told the Reform Party in 2000 that vice-presidential substitution is allowed. And, Massachusetts told Ralph Nader in 2004 that vice-presidential substitution is allowed.
The basis for allowing presidential and vice-presidential substitution is equal protection. All states allowed the Democratic Party to substitute a new vice-presidential candidate in 1972. The Democratic National Convention had chosen Thomas Eagleton for vice-president, at its national convention in July. A month later, Eagleton resigned from the ticket. The Democratic National Committee called an emergency meeting and chose Sargent Shriver as the new vice-presidential candidate. The party had already certified Eagleton’s name to all 50 states, but all states accepted an amended certification that Shriver’s name should be put on the ballot instead.
One of the favorable court precedents is El-Amin v State Board of Elections, Commonwealth of Virginia, 721 F Supp 770 (1989). The U.S. District Court said that Virginia’s failure to let independent candidate committees use substitution does not even pass the rational basis test (page 775), since Virginia lets qualified parties engage in substitution.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight: 1) The petitioning process started before the LP convention. 2) The name on the petition (George Phillies) did not match the name chosen by the convention (Bob Barr). 3) The Secretary of State won’t allow a substitution of names.
So for the Mass LP to place its party’s candidate for President on the ballot, it would have had to accurately predict the outcome of a convention that had not occurred yet. In fact, the convention’s nominee, Bob Barr, had not even declared his candidacy when the petitioning began.
Is Kafka our Secretary of State now?
Just another reason we should have our nominating convention earlier, like in the old days.
Has the Libertarian Party normally had an earlier convention so that petition drives could be accommodated? As it is, the party’s May 22 convention was months earlier than that of the D’s and R’s this year. It seems unreasonable that we would have to make it even earlier just to accommodate the petitioning requirements of a single state.
Ben,
Actually, we always had it earlier. We used to nominate the year before. Bergland was nominated at the 1983 convention and Ron Paul at the 1987 convention. While we’ve played around with the scheduling, for the most part the conventions were the year before.
I should add that the Mass. Secretary of State’s office told us that substitution would be allowed earlier this year, before we started petitioning… They said it would simply be a matter of filing the appropriate paperwork, presumably a form signed by all the electors, though they were a bit unclear on that part.
It was not until AFTER the Natcon when we started to ask about what the mechanics of DOING the substitution would be that they changed their minds and said they weren’t going to allow the substitution. The grounds for changing their minds were that they had allowed the earlier substitutions because the need had come up after the normal “Petitioning window” had closed – however because we had held our convention EARLY enough, the window was still open (it doesn’t close until mid-July) so the Barr campaign could simply go out and collect signatures on a new petition and qualify that way…
ART
LPMA Operations Facilitator
Potential LPMA Presidential Elector (Who won’t vote for Barr!)
(speaking for myself)