Petitioners collecting signatures to place the Libertarian Party presidential ticket of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat on the New Hampshire state ballot have gathered over 4,800 raw signatures, according to information shared by a petitioner actively involved in the effort.
A screenshot shared over the weekend by Justin O’Donnell, who owns the consulting business which has been collecting signatures for the Libertarian ticket, shows that petitioners have gathered 4,808 total signatures as of that Sunday, exceeding the required minimum. “Two months down, one day left… But looks like a solid that [Chase Oliver] will be on the ballot in NH, just gotta get the validations sent out and wait till we can file at the end of August,” O’Donnell said with the screenshot.
An invoice previously shared by O’Donnell to social media indicates that Subversive Media Consulting was approached for 4,500 signatures and that the petition drive was scheduled to run from June 3 to July 15.
For the Oliver campaign to qualify for the New Hampshire state ballot, it needs to submit a minimum of 3,000 valid signatures, with 1,500 signatures coming from each of New Hampshire’s two congressional districts. In addition to the total raw number of signatures, O’Donnell’s screenshot indicates that petitioners collected well above the required minimum from both congressional districts. The actual filing deadline is not until September 4, although petitions need to be submitted to local supervisors sooner.
Less than two weeks after petitioning efforts are said to have began, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire published a statement via X saying it rejected the Oliver campaign and would withhold its support due to several key disagreements with the ticket. However, the party noted in the same announcement that the ticket was still part of the larger petitioning effort, calling it an “entirely incidental benefit.”
Thank you, Jordan.
Coincidentally, Richard Winger just posted about Kennedy being submitted as both an independent and a Libertarian candidate in New Hampshire as a result of that.
Apparently, the “New Hampshire Secretary of State has a habit of squeezing Libertarians and independents into a single party column labelled ‘Libertarian and Other’, instead of giving separate columns”, thus further eroding any distinction that may exist.
Nuña, it effectively doesn’t. It has been my assumption that the Oliver campaign was always going to petition under the Libertarian label, regardless of whether LPNH was involved in the effort.
Unless New Hampshire recognizes your party, which it doesn’t in the case of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, you’re free to petition under that label as if you’re an independent candidate. However, any other candidate can do the same. This has happened at least twice already—there were two competing Libertarian gubernatorial candidates on the general election ballot in 2022. Similarly, there were two Libertarian presidential candidates on the 2008 general election ballot, although I believe there may be a slightly different context behind that situation.
That document suggests New Hampshire does not distinguish between independent and third party candidates. Is the idea to get the Oliver-ter Maat ticket on the ballot in New Hampshire as independent, or to run them under the Libertarian label without any support from the LPNH? Or has that not been ironed out yet?