On November 17, U.S. District Court Judge Lance E. Walker, a Trump appointee, struck down two Maine ballot access laws that relate to new and minor parties. Baines v Bellows, 1:19cv-509. This is a Libertarian Party case filed in 2019, after the party lost its qualified status in Maine.
The 41-page decision strikes down the rules for a candidate to get on the primary ballot of a small qualified party. Maine is one of only three states that requires petitions to place candidates on a primary ballot, that has registration by party, and does not take into account the size of the party when it determines how many signatures are needed. Thus anyone seeking a place on a Maine primary ballot for statewide office needs 2,000 signatures of party members, and only party members may sign. It is obviously far easier for a Democrat or a Republican to find 2,000 party members to sign a primary petition, than a party that only has a few thousand registered members.
The other two states with this characteristic are Arizona and Massachusetts, but at least those two states let independent voters sign primary petitions. Maine does not. As a result, no qualified party in Maine, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, has been able to run any candidates for either house of Congress in the last 100 years. Qualified third parties in Maine in the last 30 years have been the Green, Libertarian, Reform, and Americans Elect Parties.
The other law that was struck down is termed the “purge”. When a party goes off the ballot, all its registrants are automatically converted to independent status, without even telling them. Because parties in Maine mostly obtain and retain party status based on how many registered voters they have, the law requiring all of a party’s members to be erased is extremely hurtful, and the judge felt strongly about that. Page 40 says, “The act of purging voter enrollment is a punishment in search of a wrong that would make Kafka blush.” He also said there is no real burden on election officials by allowing parties to keep their registrants, on page 38.
The decision upholds the January (of election years) deadline for a group to become a qualified party via a registration drive. There is considerable precedent around the nation that such early deadlines to qualify new parties are unconstitutional, but the decision does not mention them, and this part of the decision is quite short. It is likely that a newly-formed party would be a better plaintiff to attack the deadline than the Libertarian Party, because the Libertarian Party has been in continous existence for 50 years, whereas a party formed in an election year could not have been expected to have qualified before it was in existence.
Further proceedings will be held in this case to determine what the remedy should be.
