On July 15, U.S. District Court Judge James M. Moody, Jr., an Obama appointee, issued an order in Libertarian Party of Arkansas v Martin, e.d., 4:15cv-635. It says the Arkansas law requiring newly-qualifying parties to choose all their nominees (except for President) a year before the general election is unconstitutional. It says, “The Court finds that the Arkansas statutory scheme concerning ballot access for new party state candidates places a minor burden on the Libertarian Party as evidenced by the Party’s success in placing 17 candidates on the 2016 general election ballot.”

Then the order continues, “The Secretary of State has not articulated any valid interest in requiring the Libertarian Party of Arkansas, or any new political party, to nominate their candidates by a convention which must take place before the primary. Even though the Court finds the Libertarian Party’s burden to be minor, there is no interest, regulatory or otherwise, to justify this restriction by the State.”

The Arkansas primary is in March. The Libertarian Party had nominated 17 candidates in November 2015, in accordance with the law. Then it had held a second convention on February 27, 2016, and nominated four more candidates for the state legislature, and also four more candidates for partisan local office. The order does not require the state to put the February convention candidates on the ballot, because the judge felt that they could just as easily have been nominated at the November 2015 convention.

An oddity of Arkansas law requires newly-qualifying parties to submit their petition by September of the odd year before the election. All of these laws were passed in 2015. Yet in 1977, and again in 1996, federal courts in Arkansas had ruled that the old party petition deadlines of April (the 1977 case) and January (the 1996 case) were unconstitutionally early. The Arkansas legislature, more than any other state legislature, is in the habit of re-enacting new ballot access restrictions even though similar restrictions had been held unconstitutional in the past.