Libertarians argue registration law unfair
The attorney for the Libertarian Party is asking a federal appeals court to overturn legislation he argued makes it harder to register to vote as a member of a minority political party.
Attorney David Hardy said limiting the checkboxes on voter-registration forms to just Republicans and Democrats is a self-re-enforcing cycle on the part of the two predominant parties.
A person registering to vote is essentially told that there are two real political parties, and some unnamed other ones, Hardy said in his opening brief to a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which conducted a special hearing Thursday at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law.
The Arizona Libertarian Party, along with the Green Party, sued Arizonas then-Secretary of State Ken Bennett in December 2011 after the Legislature passed an amendment to an election statute, changing how voters could identify their party of choice.
The paper registration form created under the 2011 amendment offers an option of other, with what Hardy calls a tiny line to fill out voters party preference for those registering as anything other than Republican or Democrat.
Prior to that, the form provided a blank write-in for all party preferences.
Attorney Robert Ellman, representing the state, argued limiting the options to mainstream parties improves the efficiency and accuracy of voter-registration processing and encourages political stability through a healthy two-party system.
Having checkboxes for the two largest political parties will ease the process of reading and counting a substantial number of forms, he said. On the voters part, checking a box is marginally easier than writing the partys name, he added.
According to the states voter registration report, during the 2014 general election, about 1.1 million Arizonans registered as Republicans and about 940,000 as Democrats. About 27,000 people registered as Libertarians.
A figure for the Green Party could not be determined, as the party was dropped from the ballot in November 2013, not having met the legal minimum requirement for the number of people who elected to register as party members.