On March 24, the government of New Hampshire filed this brief with the First Circuit, in defense of its 2014 law making it illegal for a group to circulate the party petition in an odd year. The case was filed by the Libertarian Party, which is the only party that has ever managed to complete a New Hampshire party petition in the 19 years the law has existed. The party managed to complete that petition, which requires signatures equal to 3% of the last gubernatorial vote, in 2000 and 2012. Both times, the party started in the middle of the odd year before the election, and didn’t finish it until the middle of the election year. In response to the party’s 2012 success, the legislature changed the law to eliminate odd-year petitioning.
The brief spends a great deal of time attacking the New Hampshire Libertarian Party for being weak and small. The brief says the party has fewer than 150 registered members. This claim is laughable. New Hampshire is one of only two states (that has registration by party) that will not tally the number of registered Libertarians (the other state is Rhode Island). No one knows how many people wrote in the word “Libertarian” on the voter registration forms, on the blank line. The state also attacks the party for having few people attend its state convention, without acknowledging that a leading reason the party is weak is that the New Hampshire ballot access laws are so stringent. New Hampshire is one of only five states in November 2014 that had a ballot monopoly on all the statewide offices for the Democratic and Republican Parties.
The state claims its interest in the new law is to avoid “ballot clutter.” This is also laughable, because New Hampshire has the nation’s most “cluttered” presidential primary ballots, every year. The Secretary of State importunes candidates to file in the New Hampshire primary. This year there were 28 Democrats on the Democratic presidential primary ballot, and 30 Republicans on the Republican ballot.