On May 10, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion in Martin v Simon, A24-0216. It immediately removes the Legal Marijuana Now Party from the ballot, even though the party has already had a government-administered presidential primary this year and was about to have a primary for congress and state office August 13. The deadline for candidates to file in that primary is June 4, less than a month away.
The vote is 5-0. The Minnesota Supreme Court has seven members. Two justices, Margaret Chutich and Karl Procaccini, did not participate. All members of the court except one were appointed by Democratic Governors.
On February 6, the Minnesota Democratic Party had filed the lawsuit to remove the Legal Marijuana Now Party on the basis that the party failed to maintain a state central committee subject to the state convention’s control. There was no allegation that any member of the party objected to the party’s less formal procedure. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1989 in Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee that the First Amendment’s Freedom of Association clause protects a party’s right to determine its own structure, and that should have caused the lawsuit to be rejected. The California Libertarian Party, which was a co-plaintiff, had won that lawsuit, because it objected to a state law telling the party to have a state central committee based on county central committees, and the party preferred to have regions of its own choosing rather than counties as the basic units.
Unfortunately, however, in 1979 in Marchioro v Cheney, ten years before the Eu decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a Washington state law that required a qualified party to have a state central committee with two members from each county. That is the only precedent the Minnesota Supreme Court mentioned in its summary of its own decision, See page four. The Marchioro decision is widely considered to be obsolete, and in any event the Court had felt the Washington law didn’t hurt the Washington Democratic Party (which had brought the case) because a party was free under Washington law to provide that the state central committee have virtually no power within the party.
The Legal Marijuana Now Party had also argued that the Purcell Principle prevents a court from making a change to election procedures very close to a primary or an election. But the Minnesota Supreme Court said that the Purcell Principle, which was created in 2006 by the U.S. Supreme Court, only applies to federal courts, not state courts.
The Minnsota Supreme Court did not mention any court precedents that say ballot access rules cannot be made more restrictive in the middle of the campaign season. The leading such case is Hudler v Austin, a 3-judge U.S. District Court decision from Michigan in 1976 that was summarily affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, 430 U.S. 924. The Minnesota law that made the Legal Marijuana Now Party vulnerable was passed in 2023, and signed May 23.
The Minnesota Supreme Court did not mention Williams v Rhodes, the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down Ohio ballot access laws for new parties. In that opinion, Justice William O. Douglas wrote a concurrence when he suggested one reason the Ohio law was unconstitutional was that it required new parties to have a big formal structure.
The Legal Marijuahna Now Party will ask for U.S. Supreme Court involvement.
