The Ohio Libertarian Party is not ballot-qualified, so it is using the independent presidential petition. That petition, which requires 5,000 signatures, is now finished and will soon be submitted to the Secretary of State. Although the Libertarian Party does not know yet whom its national ticket will be, Ohio permits stand-ins on the petition, and the party used stand-ins for both President and Vice-President.
On March 15, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Stein v Federal Election Commission, 23-771. This is the lawsuit over the rules for getting primary season matching funds. Stein received federal matching funds in 2016 in her quest for the Green Party nomination and the Peace & Freedom Party nomination. The FEC says it overpaid her and it wants over $100,000 back. The result hinges on when the primary season matching funds period ended. Stein says it ended when she failed to get the Peace & Freedom nomination. The government says it ended when she got the Green Party nomination. Although there were only a few weeks between those two dates, Stein received a large share of her contributions during that period.
On February 27, the Socialist Equality Party said its presidential nominee this year is Joseph Kishore. Here is a wikipedia article about him. He was also the party’s presidential nominee in 2020. This year his running mate is Jerry White.
LOUISIANA CHANGES CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION SYSTEM; NEW LAW BARS MINOR PARTY CANDIDATES
On January 22, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed HB 17, a bill that had been introduced only one week earlier. The purpose of the bill was to transform Louisiana’s election system from a system in which parties don’t have nominees (except for President) into a state in which parties do have nominees for all public office. The bill was amended to apply only to elections for Congress and a few state offices, and then passed.
Unfortunately, the bill made a drafting error and now it is impossible for qualified minor parties to have candidates for either house of Congress. The law continues to say that a qualified party is any group with 1,000 registrants. The new law says that the only qualified parties that may have primaries are those parties that got 5% for a statewide office in either the last state election or the last presidential election. None of the three minor qualified parties (Libertarian, Green, or Independent) got 5% in a recent statewide election.
The new law has no mechanism for those three parties to nominate candidates for either house of Congress, nor for the other offices that will now have party nominees: State Supreme Court, State Education Board, and Public Service Commission. In theory, the new law could have provided that they nominate by convention, which would have been a sensible solution. But instead there is no mechanism.
The California Libertarian Party state convention in Costa Mesa, Orange County, heard from Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Cornel West, along with multiple Libertarian candidates for the party’s presidential nomination. Semafor has this story describing the interactions.
