LPNY Secretary Braiman has a message for new (or renewing) LPNY members seeking to enable the party to obtain statewide ballot status this year, while assisting local candidates at the same time. A few prospective candidates may attend the LPQC Convention on February 10, come to Donovan’s Pub and meet them!:
Mark Braiman, Secretary
secretary@lpny.org
We Need Your Help as a Co-Petitioning Downballot Candidate
Libertarian Party of New York (LPNY) member:
I am writing you as a member of a recently-formed LPNY committee planning to get Libertarian candidates onto New York’s ballot for the November 2024 election. This includes a “stand-in” Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Presidency.
Why just a “stand-in”? Due to New York’s onerous and complicated petitioning rules, along with the National Libertarian Party’s nomination rules, we need to collect well over 45,000 signatures statewide during a 6-week period that ends Memorial Day weekend, the same weekend 
the Libertarian National Convention will be underway in Washington, D.C. to choose a national candidate for President. You can help us achieve this challenging task if you volunteer to collect signatures.
You can be of special help, if you collect signatures as a Libertarian candidate yourself, for a downballot race. New York’s Election Law makes a lot of things about petitioning hard, but one provision makes things easier. Certain downballot candidates can appear on the same Independent Nominating Petition sheet as the Presidential candidate. So a single signature counts for all candidates on that sheet, as long as the downballot candidate is running in a district that includes multiple counties, at least one of which must be outside New York City.
Running in a multi-county district for Congress, State Senate, or Assembly can all work. Here are the districts that qualify:
Assembly Districts (42 in all): 9-11, 94-95, 98-104, 106-108,110-118,120-122, 124-127, 130-133,139-140, 144-145,147-148, 150
State Senate Districts (20 in all): 8, 34, 36, 39-41, 43-46, 48-54, 57-58, 62.
Congressional Districts (13 in all): 2,3, and 16-26
I did such co-petitioning in service to Larry Sharpe’s gubernatorial candidacy in 2018, as a candidate in NY’s 53rd State Senate district. I was personally able to collect over 500 signatures, plus a few more collected by some close friends. This was not enough to get me on the November ballot, but it helped get Larry there, where he won enough votes to gain us (temporarily) official party status in New York.
Let me tell you, it’s much easier to walk up to a voter and say “I’m running for office for the first time. Please help me get on the ballot as a third-party candidate,” rather than “Please help us reserve a spot on the ballot for a different guy”. Especially “an unnamed Libertarian Presidential candidate who we won’t choose until a few days or weeks from now”. The voter sees a friendly face, and can ask you questions about yourself. A good 50% of the time, the voter will be happy just to get a new choice on the ballot. Especially this year.
We are initially prioritizing candidates for Assembly, at least for Upstate areas. The number of signatures required to actually get on the ballot is only 1,500, much smaller than for State Senate (3,000) or Congress (3,500). We are particularly interested in young candidates, since voters are especially open to helping young petitioners with their first run for office. Candidates for Assembly (or State Senate) only need to be 18, whereas Congressional candidates must be 25. And there is a chance that due to a court case, Congressional districts will not be finalized until very close to the petitioning period in April, or even later.
Voters are not as demanding of qualifications and detailed positions—as long as the office is a “starter” office like Assembly. And finally, for the April-May petition period, young candidates collecting signatures are likely to be more welcome on busy community-college and state college campuses.
Even if you don’t think getting yourself onto the November ballot is a likelihood, we hope that you will view putting your name on a shared petition so you can reap voter signatures as a desirable strategy. PLEASE consider this if your goal is to see someone on the Presidential ballot in NY not named Biden or Trump.
However you envision your goals, and whatever your age, we will work on helping all such candidates coordinate with each other on issues and petitioning strategies. We already have one smart and eager Assembly candidate from the 107th district covering parts of Rensselaer and surrounding counties, 21-year-old Evan Lebrecht who just announced on his Facebook page.
Having heard the possibilities, won’t you please email me back at secretary@lpny.org, and let me know as soon as possible (but in no case later than March 30) that you would consider putting yourself out there to help with this petitioning strategy. We need to know by then, so that we can design and print the petition forms with your name and statewide candidates on them. Getting those forms designed correctly is the most important way we in the Libertarian Party of New York can help you to help us.
Call to Action: Who else would you want to be on your ballot?
Even if you can’t possibly envision yourself as a petitioning candidate, please pass this email on to a friend you think might be interested!
JOIN OUR FIGHT FOR LIBERTY IN NYS.
Please click below to join the LPNY today, and learn how you can help to get Libertarian candidates on the ballot in 2024.