Judge orders that 2 Libertarians be on ballot

OLYMPIA – Breathing new life into two dead campaigns, a Thurston County judge on Wednesday ordered election officials to put two Libertarians on the statewide November ballot, even though they didn’t get enough votes.

“We feel that this is a last resort,” Libertarian Party state chairman Larey McLaren said of the party’s lawsuit.

The party last week asked Secretary of State Sam Reed to put Senate candidate J. Mills and gubernatorial candidate Ruth Bennett on the ballot, despite the fact that they fell short of getting the required 1 percent of the vote. Reed refused.

“If we’re the minuscule threat that he thinks we are, then what does it hurt to put us on the general election ballot?” said McLaren. “How is voter choice served by denying Libertarian Party candidates access to the ballot?”

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Richard Strophy sided with the party. Under state election law, major party candidates must get 1 percent of the primary vote for a particular office. If they don’t, they don’t move on to the November general ballot.

The rule doesn’t apply to minor party candidates, who automatically appear on the November ballot, so long as they can gather enough signatures to qualify as a candidate.

Strophy said the 1 percent requirement is unconstitutional under the state’s new primary, since the new partisan primary – unlike the old one – requires people to pick a party ballot. The hundreds of thousands of people that picked Democratic or Republican ballots, therefore, never even had a chance to vote for Mills or Bennett. The state will not appeal Strophy’s ruling.

“He said that applied to the facts of this case, he was finding it (the 1 percent rule) unconstitutional,” said Libertarian attorney Richard Shepard, of Tacoma. “He was trying to leave open the door for a fully developed argument and presentation at a later time, should that be necessary. If he’d ruled it unconstitutional for all time, the state would have appealed. … Really the question was whether these two people would be on the ballot or not.”

Both the party and state elections officials said the ruling won’t revive the campaigns of several other Libertarian candidates who ran for local offices.

“The judge wanted it to be very clear that this was a one-time-only ruling,” Shepard said. The case cannot be used as a precedent, he said.

The lawsuit was rushed through court, since county election offices must have ballots printed by Oct. 13. Until Wednesday’s ruling, they didn’t know whether to list the two Libertarians.

In their suit, the Libertarians argued the state law makes it harder for them to get on the ballot, compared with other parties.

Green Party Senate candidate Mark Wilson, for example, will be on the November ballot because he turned in 1,000 signatures. That’s far less than Mills’ 12,945 votes or Bennett’s 7,382 votes.

“We feel that as a major party, we’ve demonstrated a modicum of support,” said McLaren. “We don’t believe that a major party should have to reach 1 percent of the vote total, while a minor party just goes right to the general election.”

Being a “major party,” however, also has significant perks. For one thing, it meant that the Libertarians didn’t have to gather hundreds of signatures simply to get one of their candidates on the ballot.

The Libertarians also got a lot of free advertising this year, when taxpayers paid for millions of dollars in state ads telling voters about Washington’s new partisan primary. The ads repeatedly named the three major parties, and featured an actress dressed up like the Statue of Liberty to represent Libertarians.