Passing on 3rd Circuit appeal, Leguía will run as a write-in

Libertarian Lana Leguía will take her bid for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th district to the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and will instead run as a write-in candidate.

“They can kick us off the printed ballot, but they cannot silence citizens demanding accountability,” she said.

In an 18-page opinion issued on Monday, U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi declined to put Leguía on the ballot after a state appellate court panel sided with Republicans in determining that she illegally used out-of-state circulators for her nominating petitions.

Despite her plan, this is essentially the end of Leguía’s 2026 campaign – her second for Congress and fourth overall.

New Jersey consistently ranks near the bottom nationwide for write-in usage, with write-ins typically accounting for less than 0.01% of all votes cast in federal elections, according to a Federal Election Commission analysis.

New Jersey has some of the lowest barriers in the nation for ballot entry.  Independent congressional candidates only need 250 signatures from registered voters to be formally printed on the general election ballot. Because of this, any candidate running a serious, well-funded campaign would be on the ballot and not competing as a write-in.

History also plays into our thoughts: every person who has represented a New Jersey congressional district since the state’s first elections in 1789 has run under a recognized major party of their era — Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig, Democratic, or Republican (or transitional labels like Jacksonian/Anti-Jacksonian and the fusion “Opposition” party of the mid-1850s, which functioned as predecessors or stand-ins for the two-party system rather than durable minor parties). No Populist, Progressive, Bull Moose, Socialist, American Labor, Prohibition, Libertarian, Green, or true independent candidate has ever been elected to Congress from New Jersey.

While write-ins rarely make a dent in general House races, they occasionally occur during primary elections when a major party fails to field a candidate on the ballot.

In the 2020 race to pick a challenger against Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Christian Onuoha secured the nomination with 508 write-in votes after both Republican candidates failed to get enough signatures on their nominating petitions.  The petition he submitted was signed by Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Derek Jeter, and Lysol Can.

New Jersey’s most memorable write-in campaign came in 1994, when Democrats in the 11th district had a filing-day mishap.  Their candidate for Congress against Rep. Dean Gallo (R-Parsippany), Daniel Tauriello, failed to file enough signatures on his petition to get on the ballot.  That left John Kucek, a Holocaust revisionist and follower of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Frank X. Herbert, a former state senator and Bergen County freeholder who was living in Sparta, came to the rescue and mounted a write-in campaign against Kucek.  He won in a landslide, 5,971 to 2,493, an incredible 71% victory at a time when 11th district Democrats had practically nothing going for them organizationally.