According to this story, an individual voter in New Mexico has filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the party is not a major party.
The party polled 7.08% in November 2020 for Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals. The candidate, Stephen Curtis, received 62,547 votes. The law says a major party is one in which “any candidate” polled as much as 5% of the total vote cast in the state for President or Governor. In 2020 the total presidential vote was 923,965. Five percent of that number is 46,199, so it seems obvious that the party met the vote test for major party status. The law also requires a major party to have registration of at least one-third of 1%, but the Libertarian Party has .94% of the registration. Thanks to Rick Lass for the link.
This has the feeling of something like the Ohio case.
One of the plaintiffs is Ginger Grider, who was the Libertarian candidate for SOS in 2018 and appears to have received 4.997% of the vote.
The statute in question NM ST § 1-7-7 is poorly written. If one were suing to keep a candidate off the ballot, one would read it as applying to President and Governor. But “at the last preceding general election” would imply any office at the election. But the provision “as the case may be” could be interpreted as tieing the requirement back to the specific office.
But NM ST § 1-7-2, which defines a qualified party, clearly means president or governor. The legislature knew how to refer to those specific offices. If they wanted to limit it to those specific offices, they demonstrated that they knew how to do it.
It seems absurd that a party whose senatorial candidate in 2018 received 15% of the vote would need to redemontrate a modicum of support.
A harassment lawsuit?
@WZ,
In Ohio, a Libertarian voter challenged the party’s gubernatorial nominee based on petition irregularities. It appeared that the voter was totally clueless (a judge referred to him as a guileless dupe), and didn’t know who was footing his lawyer’s bill.
The OH judge wasn’t quite correct. The “libertarian” voter (or two…I think there were two, but it’s been a while) was a Republican who temporarily switched parties. He’d done so before, to Democrat, during a cycle when some well known right wing radio host(s) urged listeners to register Democratic for the purpose of helping to choose a Democratic nominee who they believed would be less competitive in the general election.
Allegedly, the registered libertarians was/were approached with the pitch that there was something shady about registered Democrats helping to gather Libertarian signatures. There was nothing illegal about that, and it consisted of a very tiny handful of signatures gathered by cannabis initiative supporters in exchange for a much larger number gathered on the initiative by libertarians, as well as a much larger number gathered by a professional signature gatherer who was hired by the libertarians, not the Democrats, but who happened to be registered as a Democrat.
The actual technicality that was then used to disqualify the libertarians was that the signature gatherers did not list the libertarians as their employer, something that had never previously been applied to party or candidate petitions, and was factually questionable since the petitioners were independent contractors, not employees.
This is just a set up by disgruntled former members of the LPNM. I believe the real intent here is to distract the LP’s congressional nominee in the June 1st special election and possibly drain funds that could have been used for campaigning into legal defense instead.
No breath
Just death