On October 17, U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Watson again declined to put the Ohio Libertarian Party’s candidates for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General on the November ballot. Here is the 36-page opinion in Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, southern district, 2:13cv-953.

The candidates are not on the November ballot because they didn’t win the Libertarian Party’s primary in May. They didn’t win the primary because their names weren’t on the primary ballot, and they had been removed from the primary ballot so late that the party was unable to find write-in candidates in its own primary for those offices. The candidates weren’t on the primary ballot, even though they got enough signatures on their primary petitions, because the circulators didn’t fill out a blank asking who paid them. As a result of the party not being on the November 2014 ballot for Governor, it will go off the ballot. The law requires parties to poll 2% for Governor in 2014 in order to remain on the ballot for 2015 and 2016.

However, the part of the case challenging the definition of “political party” passed by the legislature in late 2013 is still alive, and the Judge gave a faint hint that the 2013 bill might not survive the next round of litigation. Page 34 says, “In the absense of an injunction…the Libertarian Party of Ohio will lose its minor party status and have to meet the more demanding requirements of Senate Bill 193 to re-qualify should the Court uphold the statute. Because the Court has not reached the issue, however, the risk of harm that would result from application of S.B. 193’s new requirements is speculative.”

Page two says, “Plaintiffs have a long history of fighting for their constitutional right to appear on the ballot in Ohio elections, and for every victory they have achieved, new barriers to ballot access have been erected…this case illustrates that electoral politics can be unkind to the uninitiated, the political novice, or the unprepared. At the end of the day, neither of the two major political parties emerged unscathed as a result of the efforts of political operatives to manipulate the ballot for their own purposes.”