Writing on Facebook, veteran Libertarian petitioner Andrew Jacobs reports that 2024 ballot access for the Libertarian Party of Ohio was created by a Democratic Party PAC. Jacobs writes “The Democrats hired paid petitioners and Libertarians did nothing except for turning in the signatures to the Ohio Secretary of State at the end.” We have good reason to believe that his claims are correct.
In order to succeed, petitions would need the signatures of at least 1% of the number of voters at the most recent statewide election. There is also a signature distribution requirement. We believe that petitioning costs would have been well over one million dollars, given the situation in 2024.
The motive was said to be vote siphoning. These Democrats believed that Libertarians draw more votes from Republicans than from Democrats, so that having Libertarian candidates on the ballot will on the average be advantageous to Democratic candidates.
The effort doesn’t seem to have helped the Democrats in Ohio very much. Two years of Trump Administration will likely help them more.
Andy, Thanks for a detailed description of events.
A lot happening in Ohio… the current and former LNC treasurers both moved to the state in the last 6 months. The Ohio LP made very loud press releases like they were behind this petitioning effort.
Interesting.
It was openly admitted that this drive was paid for by Democrats. The State Chair of the LP of OH said it and I recall it got a little bit of media coverage.
This petition drive was started late in the election cycle. It was started a month or so prior to the deadline, maybe slightly longer but not much, if at all. So yes, doing a petition drive of this size, which required 40,345 valid signatures, and which also has a congressional district distribution requirement (I believe it requires a specified minimum number of signatures out of a majority of Ohio’s US House districts), in that short a period of time could easily exceed $1 million. I heard they collected over 87,000 signatures. It would not surprise me if they paid $15 or $20 per signature, maybe more. The Democrat group did not hire the petition circulators directly, they hired a mercenary middleman coordinator. The mercenary middleman manager/coordinator keep a cut of the money as their override. I know who they hired and these people do not work cheap.
The LP did do a petition drive in Ohio. They did the independent presidential candidate petition, which requires 5,000 valid signatures and does not allow a party label. Oddly, they allow stand in candidates and this petition can be started a year before the deadline. The LP of Ohio launched this petition in 2023. Most of these signatures were paid for by the LNC, but some were paid for by the LP of OH and some were gathered by volunteers. The got enough valid signatures to qualify it for the ballot judging from their internal validity check, but they never ended up submitting this petition to the state due to some Democrats approaching them about them paying for a full party status petition drive for the LP of OH, which they did.
I think it is sad that the Libertarian Party was not in good enough shape to regain full party status on our own there (note that Ohio allows over 1 1/2 years to work on the full party status petition), but on the plus side at least the party regained recognized party status there. The.LP of OH will need to get 3% of the vote for Governor in 2026 to retain ballot status for 2028.