To get on a ballot in D.C., you need to gather a certain amount of signatures from registered votersand the people circulating those petitions have to be registered voters in D.C. themselves. The Libertarian Party wants that to change.

This week the political party sued the D.C. Board of Elections over nominating petition rules, saying that the residency requirements unfairly hamper the efforts of three Libertarian candidatesBruce Majors, running for D.C. Delegate to Congress, Gary Johnson, running for president and Jim Gray, running for vice presidentto get on the November ballot. According to the suit, which was first reported by the City Paper’s Loose Lips, the Libertarian Party wants anyone, regardless of residency, to be able to collect signatures for nominating petitions.

The lawsuit isn’t of much use to Majors, the D.C. resident challenging D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton who said that he already has the 3,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot. (He only learned of the suit 48 hours before it was filed; the Center for Competitive Democracy and the national Libertarian Party took the lead on filing it.) Rather, it is aimed to help Johnson and Gray, who have to gather close to 5,000 signatures by August 8 to get on the D.C. ballot. The lawsuit also squares with the libertarian philosophy that fewer rules are better.

Earlier this year the party filed a similar lawsuit in Virginia, where they were backed by the ACLU. The plaintiff in that suit was Darryl Bonner, a resident of Pennsylvania, libertarian and a paid professional petition circulator.

According to the suitposted belowVirginia’s restrictions placed a “severe burden” on the Libertarian Party’s “First Amendment rights by making it more difficult for them to disseminate their political views, to choose the most effective means of conveying their message, to associate in a meaningful way with the prospective solicitors for the purposes of eliciting political change, to gain access to the ballot, and to utilize the endorsement of their candidate which can be implicit in a solicitors efforts to gather signatures on the candidates behalf.”

According to Majors, ballot access lawsuits date back to the 1980s. But in the most recent case in D.C., Johnson and the Libertarian Party will have to hope for judicial relief sooner rather than latersignatures are due to the Board of Elections next week.

20120514 Virginia Ballot Access Complaint

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