On February 6, the state chair of the Democratic Party of Minnesota filed a lawsuit in the Minnesota Supreme Court to remove the Legal Marijuana Now Party from the 2024 primary and general election ballots. Martin v Simon, A24-0216. Here is the filing. The lawsuit alleges that the Legal Marijuana Now Party does not have the complete structure required by a 2023 law.

The Minnesota 2023 law, requiring extensive organization and dozens of local organizing meetings, is probably unconstitutional under several U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court has protected minor parties from having the type of organization that the Republican and Democratic Parties customarily have.

In Williams v Rhodes, 1968, the Court put the American Independent Party on the Ohio ballot as a full-fledged qualified party, even though it didn’t have the extensive organization that Ohio required. In 1989, in Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California laws that required all qualified parties to elect their governing body on the basis of county lines. The unanimous decision permitted the Libertarian Party to use its own structure based on regions of the state that the Libertarians had developed.

In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Illinois law that kept the Harold Washington Party off the ballot in Cook County because it didn’t have candidates for County Commission in the suburban half of Cook County.

Most important, in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court in Storer v Brown said that the independent candidate and the political party approaches to political activity are distinct, and a state must have constitutional procedures for both of them. This was a California case in which the state had tried to argue that if the independent candidate procedures were too difficult, it didn’t matter because the party procedures were adequate.

The Minnesota Democratic Party thinks that the Legal Marijuana Now Party should accept loss of its qualified party status and run its nominees as independent candidates. In Minnesota and half the other states, independent candidates are free to choose a partisan label for their nominees. But that is not good enough, according to a 1980 decision of the Eighth Circuit from North Dakota, McLain v Meier. In that case, the Chemical Farming Banned Party wanted full party status, not just the ability to run independent candidates with that label on the ballot, and the Chemical Farming Banned Party won that case. Minnesota is in the Eighth Circuit, so the McLain precedent is binding on Minnesota. Like Minnesota, North Dakota at the time let independent candidates use a partisan label.