Libertarian candidates miss ballot

Two legislative candidates from the Libertarian Party did not qualify for the general election and will not be added to ballots in Spokane County, a judge ruled Wednesday afternoon.

While that’s bad news for Gary Rhodes and Bodhi Densmore, who ran for the two state House of Representatives seats in the 6th District, it’s good news for Spokane County taxpayers and absentee voters.

Adding Rhodes and Densmore would have required new ballots and added as much as $60,000 to the cost of printing them, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said. The printing delays also would have caused the county to miss the Oct. 15 deadline for getting ballots to absentee voters.

Now, the county should meet that deadline. If nothing else comes up.

Rhodes and Densmore failed to get at least 1 percent of the ballots cast in the Sept. 14 primary, the minimum set in statutes for qualifying for the general election.

But that requirement predates the state’s new primary law, which was rewritten under federal court order to limit voters to selecting candidates from only one party.

Libertarians had argued that the new law essentially wipes out the 1 percent rule. Green Party candidates who were not on the primary ballot, and therefore did not get 1 percent of the ballots cast, are allowed on the primary ballot, they added.

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins rejected the request for several reasons. For one thing, she said, the Libertarian Party missed the deadline set down in state law for challenging the primary election, filing its request nearly a week late.

Tompkins said she was reluctant to close off the party’s appeal just on procedure. In looking at the other arguments, however, she said the party failed to provide any legal proof that the new law “has supplanted or replaced that 1 percent rule.”

The Green Party’s candidates weren’t required to get 1 percent of the primary votes because it’s a minor party, she said.

“The Libertarian Party is considered a major party,” she said. As such, its candidates must get 1 percent of the ballots cast for a particular office.

Rhodes got .7466 percent and Densmore got .715 percent.

Tompkins came to a different conclusion than Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard Strophy, who ordered Libertarian candidates for the U.S. Senate and governor onto the statewide ballot even though they did not reach the 1 percent limit.

J. Mills, the party’s Senate candidate and its attorney for arguing the case in Spokane, said the party may appeal Tompkins’ ruling at some later date to clear up the confusion. They may wait to see whether voters change the primary system again by approving an initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot, which would make an appeal in this case moot.

“It’s not useful to have election by crisis,” Mills said. “It would make sense to have this resolved in an organized way for the next round of elections.”

But the Libertarians will not seek a court order to block Tompkins order right away, so the county can go ahead with printing its ballots.

Dalton said that the Nov. 2 ballot is so full that adding the two names would have forced a switch to a larger paper size for ballots for all voters, even though Rhodes and Densmore are only running in a portion of the county. The computerized voting machines can’t be programmed to accept one size ballot in the 6th Legislative District and a different size in all other districts, she said.

Using larger paper for some 250,000 ballots needed for the election would have been more expensive. So would the cost of destroying ballots already printed.

To meet the deadlines to get absentee ballots into voters’ hands by Oct. 15, Dalton said she took a chance that Tompkins would reject the Libertarians’ request and told the printer to start printing ballots on Wednesday.

She would have had to destroy 20,000 ballots if Tompkins had ruled the other way, and the county would definitely have missed the deadline.

As it is, the county has used up any cushion it had for problems at the printer, she said. “We have to scramble and pray that there’s not one teeny thing go wrong.”