The Kennedy campaign announced this past Thursday that it submitted double the number of signatures needed to place Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan on the Colorado state ballot as an independent ticket.
According to a release published by the Kennedy campaign, volunteers submitted over 30,000 signatures, more than doubling the required 12,000 necessary for independent or unaffiliated presidential candidates to qualify for the ballot. Submitted petitions were also required to include at least 1,500 signatures from Colorado voters who hadn’t already signed a petition for another presidential candidate in each of the state’s eight congressional districts.
“The volunteers in Colorado have gone above and beyond the call of duty to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot,” said Colorado State Director Isaac James in the release. “They have driven hundreds of miles and dedicated countless hours to ensure he’s on the ballot in each congressional district.”
This announcement comes just a week after the Kennedy campaign stated that it would enter into a partnership with the Libertarian Party of Colorado, appearing on the party’s state ballot line in lieu of the Libertarian Party presidential ticket of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat chosen at the party’s national convention in May. The Libertarian Party of Colorado previously cited significant policy disagreements with the party’s national ticket and expressed a desire to see Colorado become a swing state in the general election through Kennedy’s candidacy. The move has since prompted backlash from Libertarians supportive of retaining the convention-nominated ticket in accordance with party bylaws, leading to the filing of a signed certificate of nomination with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office following news of the partnership.
The recent announcement from the Kennedy campaign also included a statement from Libertarian Party of Colorado Chair Hannah Goodman, who expressed hope to still place Kennedy on the Libertarian ballot line. To Goodman, such a move would allow the Kennedy campaign to appear as both an independent candidate and a candidate affiliated with the state Libertarian Party “in tradition of fusion voting.” However, Colorado state law does not immediately address instances of fusion voting or other similar situations where Kennedy could appear as both an independent and Libertarian candidate.
In fact, where language does address nominations as they relate to minor parties, one potential barrier to Kennedy appearing on the ballot twice is C.R.S § 1-4-1304, which states that minor party-nominated candidates “for any general election” must be affiliated with the party making the nomination “no later than the first business day of the January immediately preceding the general election for which the person was nominated, unless otherwise provided in the constitution or bylaws of the minor party.” However, the requirement mentions “statewide voter registration,” possibly limiting its scope to Colorado candidates unless interpreted differently for presidential candidates. While it’s not publicly known if Kennedy approached the Colorado affiliate sooner, he did not formally join the Libertarian Party as a sustaining member until the weekend of the national convention, when he did so to be eligible to seek the party’s presidential nomination.
I will not address previous Colorado Secretaries of State’s attitude towards minor parties and independents, but incumbent Jena Griswold has made quite a name for herself trying on all sorts of different tricks to illegally bar or remove candidates from the ballot, and not just minor party candidates and independent either, but also major party opponents like Trump.
See also my comments at Ballot Access News:
https://ballot-access.org/2024/07/09/libertarian-party-national-secretary-files-paperwork-with-colorado-secretary-of-state-to-list-chase-oliver-as-the-presidential-nominee/#comment-1234969
https://ballot-access.org/2024/07/09/libertarian-party-national-secretary-files-paperwork-with-colorado-secretary-of-state-to-list-chase-oliver-as-the-presidential-nominee/#comment-1234976
Colorado is historically a friendly state for minor party and independent candidates. No minor party or independent presidential candidate in history (among those who got at least 25,000 votes nationally) has ever been kept off the Colorado ballot. Strom Thurmond in 1948 is an exception, but only because he didn’t care about being on the ballot outside the south.
As to the affiliation of candidates for presidential elector, 1-4-1304 says “No nomination under this section shall be valid unless the nominee…has been affiliated…with the minor political party…” It has no exception for candidates for presidential elector.
They only need 12,000 valid and they have a paid staff of people checking the validity of every signature before they submit to the state so I fail to see why it was necessary for them to turn in 30,000.
Because the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, regardless of which major party runs it, is historically hostile to third parties, independents, and unaffiliated candidates.
In fact, where language does address nominations as they relate to minor parties, one potential barrier to Kennedy appearing on the ballot twice is C.R.S § 1-4-1304, which states that minor party-nominated candidates “for any general election” must be affiliated with the party making the nomination “no later than the first business day of the January immediately preceding the general election for which the person was nominated, unless otherwise provided in the constitution or bylaws of the minor party.” However, the requirement mentions “statewide voter registration,” possibly limiting its scope to Colorado candidates unless interpreted differently for presidential candidates. While it’s not publicly known if Kennedy approached the Colorado affiliate sooner, he did not formally join the Libertarian Party as a sustaining member until the weekend of the national convention, when he did so to be eligible to seek the party’s presidential nomination.
CRS 1-4-1304 does not apply to Presidential candidates, only to state-level candidates and Congress/Senate. The Minor Party Law in Colorado, CRS 1-4-1300 et seq., only applies to state political parties and not nationally. Nor can it by law.
However, people keep forgetting a major point: the people on the ballot are the Presidential Electors, NOT the candidate themselves, whose name is only a shorthand proxy for those Electors. It should also be noted that election of Presidential Electors are covered in the LPCO Convention Rules, but are not required to be there by the Minor Party Law; they were put there to codify the tradition.
The real procedural questions are these: 1. Are the Libertarian Presidential Electors selected at the March LPCO Convention bound to Chase Oliver? 2. Have those Presidential Electors been filed with the Colorado Secretary of State? 3. If not, why not? 4. Is it confirmed that Oliver has filed his own set of Presidential Electors, and are they LPCO Members?
There are more questions that are political in nature that I won’t get into here, but an appeal is pending with the LPCO Judicial Committee (not the previously-rejected Vadney appeal). For the record, I have no part in that appeal.
I had to hire friends of friends of a friend for a client to be presidential electors a few years ago. The client was a minor party candidate, but I don’t remember if they used party qualification or independent to qualify in Colorado. My friend’s friend was only hired to recruit them and make sure that they were registered voters of the state, period. The client did not ask us to ensure that they were registered with any party or lack thereof. She and all her family, friends and neighbors she recruited were all from the Denver area, so there must not have been any district requirements either.
Presidential candidates and presidential electors are different. Stares can have requirements for electors.
@Richard Winger
States cannot add requirements for presidential candidates beyond the US Constitution, meaning they don’t have to be a Colorado voter.
There is no particular Colorado law requiring a electors to be affiliated as indepedent (this designation/ label doesn’t exist in Colorado where it’s referred to as “unaffiliated”). Similarly, there is no Colorado law affecting minor parties’ selection of presidential electors in this way either (something typically governed by party bylaws).
Maybe it’s like that in other states but not Colorado.
The Kennedy independent candidates for presidential elector must be registered independents. The Libertarian candidates for elector must be registered Libertarians. Therefore it is impossible for Kennedy to be a fusion nominee in Colorado. If he were on the ballot twice, with separate sets of presidential electors, that would split up his vote, so if he were possibly competitive for carrying Colorado, having two completely sets of presidential elector candidates would mean the vote could not be combined. Any presidential candidate who gets on a ballot is sabotaging himself or herself if there are two competing slates of presidential elector candidates pledged to him or her.
In 2016 Gary Johnson was on in New York both as the Independence nominee and the Libertarian nominee, but the slates of elector candidates for each party were different people. So by permitting this, Gary Johnson and his campaign were implicitly admitting he had no hope of carrying New York state in any event.
They only need 12,000 valid and they have a paid staff of people checking the validity of every signature before they submit to the state so I fail to see why it was necessary for them to turn in 30,000.