on August 12, both sides in the lawsuit Libertarian Party of Maine v Dunlap, the ballot access case, asked the judge to put the lawsuit on hold until December 15, 2016. This is the case in which the judge granted injunctive relief to the Libertarian Party, putting it on the ballot this year. Although the injunction was granted, there has been no decision on whether the deadline for a new party to get on the ballot is constitutional. Both sides say it would be a waste of the court’s time to spend any more time on the case this year, because probably the legislature will improve the law next year.
The chief issue in the case is the deadline for a new party to qualify, December of the year before the election. A side issue is whether voters should be able to register into an unqualified party and have those registrations tallied.
If they eliminated the partisan primaries there would be no reason for party qualification.
Richard, any idea on what they will recommend?
The Maine primary is in June, so the sensible idea would be to provide that newly-qualifying parties nominate by convention. That is the norm across the U.S., so as to make it possible for new parties to qualify as late as the middle of the election year. Other states in which the early deadline for new parties was struck down, so the law was changed to let new parties nominate by convention, are Arkansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, and Tennessee. If we win the South Dakota case then that state might do the same thing. The National Municipal League published “A Model Direct Primary Law” in 1951 and recommended that small qualified parties (whether new or old) should nominate by convention, not primary. The author was Dr. Joseph P. Harris, then the nation’s leading expert on election administration.