By Will Sommer:
Bruce Majors has found a few more bodies. With his party’s first primary just months away, the District’s Libertarian mastermind is scrambling for names to put on the ballot. Last Thursday, he had two more people to shepherd through the Board of Elections.
District rules require that candidates have signatures from 1 percent of their party’s registered members to qualify for ballot access, so the flood of Democrats prepping for April’s primary election need as many as 2,000 signatures to run. Wary of bogus signatures and Board of Elections challenges, many of them will collect many times that; mayoral hopeful Muriel Bowser claimed to have pulled together 4,000 in one weekend. But with only 145 registered Libertarians, each of Majors’ candidates only needs two signatures to make it through.
Thanks to Majors, this is the first year the District’s Libertarians have faced such an easy bar to get on the ballot. In 2012, he ran against Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and lost miserably, earning a little less than 6 percent of the vote. But Majors’ ballots were enough to qualify the Libertarians as a “major party” with the Board of Elections. In their first election as a city-recognized party, they’re enjoying the benefits and facing the rivalries of a much larger party.
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