On August 14, the New Mexico Secretary of State filed this brief in defense of the state’s ballot access laws for minor parties.  New Mexico Forward Party v Toulouse Oliver, 1:26cv-2286.  New Mexico is the only state that requires new parties to file one petition to qualify the party and then, after nominating candidates in a convention, requires each nominee to submit his or her own separate petition.  The state’s brief denies this, but does not name any other state with such a double-petitioning requirement.

Each statewide nominee needs 14,246 signatures.  If the party had nominated for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, each of the two needs his or her own separate petition; they can’t both be on the same petition, even though they are elected as a team in the general election.

If the Forward Party can’t succeed in winning injunctive relief, New Mexico will be one of only five or six states this year with a Democratic-Republican ballot monopoly for all the statewide offices.  Two states this year, Utah and Washington, have no statewide offices up.  The other monopoly states are Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana (unless a lawsuit wins), maybe North Dakota, and Virginia.  New York has four parties on the ballot but the two minor parties don’t have their own separate nominees for all the statewide offices.

New Mexico’s brief says the state is in danger of having a crowded ballot without its nominee petitions, but its only two examples have nothing to do with nominee petitions.  New Mexico cites the 1972 Democratic U.S. Senate primary when 25 candidates were on the ballot, but that was because a court had invalidated the filing fees that year, and at the time no petitions were needed for primary candidates.  New Mexico also cites 1992, when there were ten presidential candidates on the general election ballot.  But that is because the state let parties on the ballot that year that had not ever been required to submit any petition for either party status or for a nominee.  The existing petition requirement for new parties (one-half of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote) had been created in 1989, but it wasn’t yet in effect.

Nowhere does New Mexico explain why it doesn’t require nominee petitions for minor party presidential candidates.