New Jersey elects its Governor and the lower house of its legislature this November. Petitions for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, were due yesterday.
For the 80 Assembly seats, these are the minor party nominees: Green Party, Stephen Walzer; Libertarian Party, Daryl Brooks and Charles Green; Modern Whig Party, Gene Baldassari; Socialist Party, Constantino Rozzo. There are also 12 independent candidates for Assembly.
For Governor, the only minor party candidates are Kenneth Kaplan for the Libertarians, and Greg Pason for the Socialist Party. There are also eight independent candidates for Governor.
New Jersey still treats third party candidates as “independents.” There are no third party primaries, and only recently did the state allow so-called independents to put a “party designation” on the ballot.
No, that is a misunderstanding. New Jersey has always permitted anyone who uses the independent procedure to have a party label of his or her choice on the November ballot (except the label can’t mimic the name of a qualified party, such as Democrat or Republican). If New Jersey had ever refused to allow such labels, then its election law would have been unconstitutional, because the US Supreme Court ruled in Storer v Brown in 1974 that states must have procedures both for new parties and for independents. I have collected ballots since 1960 and I know that New Jersey has always printed ballot labels for minor party candidates.
If I remember correctly, the recent NJ Election Law change was to allow voters to register to a party designation other than Democrat, Republican or Independent.
Mark Heacock is running for General Assembly District 5 on the Green Party line in New Jersey.