By Howard Fischer | Capitol Media Services via Arizona Daily Star
The Arizona Libertarian Party is making a last-ditch effort to quash a state statute that it says was designed to keep its candidates off the ballot.
In filings with the U.S. Supreme Court, attorney Oliver Hall from the Center for Competitive Democracy said the law pushed through the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2015 sharply increased — sometimes by a factor of 30 — the number of signatures needed for Libertarian candidates to qualify for the ballot.
That wasn’t by accident. In fact the record shows that J.D. Mesnard, then a GOP representative from Chandler and now a state senator, told colleagues that Republicans would have been elected to two congressional seats had it not been for what he said were Libertarian candidates in the same race siphoning votes that otherwise would have gone to the GOP contenders.
“I can’t believe we wouldn’t see the benefit of this,” Mesnard said during a floor speech.
