Judge says NJ-7 Libertarian should be tossed from ballot

A state administrative law judge has recommended that Libertarian congressional candidate Lana Leguia be removed from the ballot in New Jersey’s 7th district after finding that most of the signatures submitted on her nominating petition were collected by out-of-state circulators.

Administrative Law Judge William Courtney ruled today that New Jersey law requires circulators of independent candidate nominating petitions to be residents of the state.  As a result, he invalidated 670 signatures collected by three New York residents, leaving Leguia with just 85 valid signatures — far short of the 250 required to qualify for the November ballot.

This potentially benefits the campaign of two-term Rep. Thomas Kean, Jr. (R-Westfield), who is locked in a likely close and nationally significant race against Democrat Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot.   Libertarian voters tend to side more with Republicans than Democrats, if they vote at all.  In 2024, Leguia won 3,784 votes as Kean’s Libertarian challenger.

Earlier this week, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, who also could have siphoned some votes from Kean, withdrew from the race.  That leaves just one independent, Seamus Patrick O’Toole, on the November ballot.   He is running with the “Stop Israel’s Genocide” slogan, and Democrats unsuccessfully challenged his petitions.

The challenge against Leguía was filed by the New Jersey Republican State Committee counsel Jason Sena, who objected to approximately 670 of Leguía’s 755 signatures on the grounds that the petition circulators were not New Jersey residents.   Republicans also challenged hundreds of individual signatures, but those objections became irrelevant once the residency issue was decided.

Leguia argued that a 2021 federal court ruling, Arsenault v. Way, struck down a similar residency requirement for petition circulators in primary elections and should be applied to independent candidate petitions as well.

Courtney acknowledged that petition circulation is constitutionally protected political speech and that the federal court found New Jersey’s residency requirement unconstitutional in that case, but Courtney determined that the Office of Administrative Law lacks authority to declare a state statute unconstitutional.

“The OAL is not the proper forum for the consideration of this issue,” Courtney wrote, arguing that constitutional challenges to the law must be decided by the courts.

Applying the statute as written, Courtney determined that the signatures collected by the three New York circulators must be rejected because they were not New Jersey residents and therefore were not “voter eligible” under state law.

The initial decision now goes to Secretary of State Dale Caldwell, the lieutenant governor, who may adopt, modify, or reject Courtney’s recommendation.  In the primary, Caldwell ruled that out-of-state circulators were permissible.