U.S. District Court Judge Martha Vasquez upheld New Mexico ballot access procedures for minor parties, in a decision dated September 18 but not released until September 20. The decision is Libertarian Party of New Mexico v Vigil-Giron, 06-0615. The law requires one petition to qualify a new party, and then separate petitions for each of its nominees (after they have been nominated). No other state except Pennsylvania requires the nominees of a qualified party to submit petitions.

As a result, New Mexico will be the only state in the western half of the nation to have a Democratic-Republican ballot monopoly on all the statewide races.

Judge Vazquez seems not to have understood the New Mexico law. One of the plaintiffs’ strongest point is that New Mexico does not require nominee petitions for president. Yet, presidential ballots tend to have more candidates (around the nation in general) than ballots for other office. The opinion doesn’t seem to acknowledge that New Mexico doesn’t require nominee petitions for president. The judge cited the fact that there were 10 candidates for president in 1992, but that happened because an earlier law permitted old minor parties to be on the ballot for president (but no other office) even though they had never had to submit any signatures, nor meet any vote test.

The judge also misunderstood the New Mexico law on how a party attains major party status. She said that a major party is one that polled 5% of the statewide presidential or gubernatorial vote, for any of its nominees. Actually, the state says a major party must have polled 5% for governor or president.

The worst aspect of the decision is that the judge refused to allow any factual evidence to be presented in the case. Plaintiffs had intended to show that a majority of New Mexico legislative elections are consistently one-candidate elections. The judge wrote that no possible facts would be relevant. Her action contradicts several U.S. Supreme Court opinions, which say that judges must gather and analyze facts. Storer v Brown said, “There is no litmus test” to know whether a ballot access law is constitutional; the analysis depends on facts. Anderson v Celebrezze emphasized this even more strongly.

Another piece of evidence that the judge never heard is that no state has had fewer minor party and independent candidates on the ballot for US Senate and Governor (in the period 1980-2006) than New Mexico.

On September 19, the 9th circuit ruled that initiative and recall petitions do not need to be in any language other than English. Padilla v Lever, 03-56259. This decision was by fifteen judges, who reconsidered the earlier decision. The vote was 14-1. The earlier decision, by three judges, had said that such petitions do need to be in the same languages that are used for ballots. California ballots are in English, Spanish and Chinese.