On the evening of August 13, Gary Johnson accepted the Libertarian Party nomination for U.S. Senate from New Mexico. See this story.
The second highest percentage in the past for any Libertarian running for U.S. Senate who had both a Republican and a Democratic opponent was achieved by Carla Howell in 2000. She got 11.89% in Massachusetts.
The highest was Joe Miller in Alaska in 2016. He got 29.23%.
On August 14, a U.S. District Court struck down a New Hampshire law dealing with mailed absentee ballots. The law says if the signature on the outer envelope appears not to match the signatures on the voter registration record, the absentee ballot shall be rejected, with no notice to that voter. Here is the decision in Saucedo v Gardner, 1:17cv-183. This was an ACLU case. The decision is by Judge Landya McCafferty, an Obama appointee.
On August 14, the North Carolina State Elections Board filed this 15-page brief in Poindexter v Strach, e.d., 5:18cv-366. This is the case over whether three particular Constitution Party nominees should be on the November ballot. All three had run in Democratic or Republican primaries in May, and had lost. Then the Constitution Party nominated them at its state convention.
After they were nominated, the legislature passed a law, saying candidates who had run and lost in a partisan primary could not later be nominated by a new party that nominates by convention. The party then filed a federal lawsuit against that law. The state’s brief appears to be have been written before the August 13 decision of a state court, which said that another election law that had been passed after someone had qualified for the ballot (the ban on party labels for judicial candidates who had switched parties in the last three months) could not be enforced.
Various Montana newspapers and broadcast stations are starting to cover the Green Party lawsuit filed August 13 against the ballot access law for new parties. See this story.
On August 13, the New Mexico Supreme Court issued a one-sentence opinion in Miller v Padilla, S-1-SC-37171. It says the lower court opinion is affirmed. The case had been filed by independent candidate Carol Miller, who wanted to run for County Commission in Rio Arriba County as an independent. The New Mexico election law generally requires all non-presidential candidates to submit petitions, no matter whether they are running in a primary or in the general election. But a quirk in the law says members of major parties don’t need petitions to run in primaries for county office, yet everyone else does. Miller argued that the New Mexico State Constitution, which says elections shall be “free and equal”, meant that if members of major parties don’t need signatures, therefore no one should need them. But the lower court denied the case with no written opinion and now the State Supreme Court won’t write an opinion either.
