Libertarian Lana Leguía is officially off the ballot in New Jersey’s highly competitive 7th congressional district after the New Jersey Supreme Court declined Friday to hear her appeal of a lower-court ruling invalidating most of her nominating petition signatures.
The two-page order leaves intact a July 31 Appellate Division decision removing Leguía from the November general election ballot. It also ends her effort to rejoin a race that now includes two-term Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), Democrat Rebecca Bennett and independent candidate Seamus Patrick O’Toole, who is running under the slogan “Stop Israel’s Genocide.”
The Supreme Court did not decide whether New Jersey’s requirement that petition circulators live in the state is constitutional. Instead, the justices turned Leguía away on procedural grounds.
The court said Leguía could have raised a constitutional challenge in Superior Court but did not do so. It also found that her argument had shifted from a facial challenge — a claim that the law is always unconstitutional — to an as-applied challenge focused on how it affected her candidacy.
No record had been developed to decide that new claim, the justices said.
The ruling came despite an unusual request from Attorney General Jennifer Davenport’s office to put Leguía back on the ballot — even as the state defended the constitutionality of the law that disqualified her.
The attorney general told the Supreme Court that the residency requirement is “a constitutionally permissible exercise of the State’s right to regulate its elections.”
But in the same filing, the office said Secretary of State Dale Caldwell acted reasonably when he stopped enforcing that requirement and accepted Leguía’s petitions.
The attorney general asked the court to reverse the Appellate Division and allow Leguía to run.
That produced an apparent contradiction: the state maintained that the residency law is constitutional but also argued that Caldwell was justified in declining to enforce it because a federal court would likely strike it down.
“While the Attorney General maintains that N.J.S.A. 19:13-7’s residency requirement complies with the Constitution, the Secretary — in consultation with the Attorney General’s Office — also reasonably recognized that, given the Third Circuit’s and district court’s decision in Arsenault, a federal court would very likely hold [the law] unconstitutional if the Secretary continued to apply it,” the state said.
The state took yet another position in a separate brief. It declined to say whether the law was constitutional but asserted for the first time unequivocally that Caldwell had acted “in reliance upon and in consultation with the Attorney General’s Office” when he accepted Leguía’s petitions.
That directly addressed the gap that proved fatal before the Appellate Division.
Judges Jessica Mayer and Robert Vinci had found nothing in Caldwell’s original decision or the state’s appellate filings showing that he received and relied on advice from the attorney general. They said Caldwell, as an administrative official, could not independently disregard a statute passed by the legislature.
The new Supreme Court filings said the Department of State consulted with the attorney general’s office both after the 2021 federal ruling and when Caldwell decided the Leguía case.
But the clarification came too late to save her candidacy.
Embattled Deputy Attorney General Steven Gleeson, whose earlier position helped produce the Appellate Division defeat, was conspicuously absent from this week’s Supreme Court filings.
When the appellate judges invited the attorney general to address the dispute, Gleeson declined to say that the residency requirement was unconstitutional. He also failed to confirm that Caldwell had received and relied upon constitutional advice from the attorney general before accepting Leguía’s petitions.
The appellate judges cited that omission in removing her from the ballot.
Gleeson’s problem was not merely that he declined to take a position on the law’s constitutionality. He also failed to provide the specific factual confirmation the Appellate Division needed to uphold Caldwell’s decision: that the secretary had received and relied upon advice from the attorney general before refusing to enforce the residency requirement.
Gleeson instead argued that Caldwell had reasonably applied the federal Arsenault ruling to a nearly identical statute. But because an administrative official cannot independently declare a law unconstitutional, that argument left a critical link missing. The judges found no evidence in Caldwell’s decision or the state’s briefs that he acted on the attorney general’s legal advice.
The state’s Supreme Court filings supplied what Gleeson had omitted. They asserted unequivocally that Caldwell acted “in reliance upon and in consultation with the Attorney General’s Office,” both after Arsenault and when deciding Leguía’s case. By then, however, the missing record had already helped cost the state in the Appellate Division, and the Supreme Court declined to allow the parties to repair it on appeal.
“In fact, the AG expressly declined to opine that [the statute] is unconstitutional,” Mayer and Vinci said.
Leguía submitted 759 signatures before the June 2 deadline, and the Division of Elections initially accepted 755. Candidates need 250 valid signatures to qualify for the general election ballot.
But three New York residents collected 670 of the signatures. State law requires circulators of independent and minor-party nominating petitions to be eligible New Jersey voters.
Without the signatures gathered by the nonresidents, Leguía had only 85 — leaving her 165 short.
The New Jersey Republican State Committee challenged the petitions. Administrative Law Judge William Courtney agreed that the 670 signatures should be rejected, although he said he lacked the authority to decide whether the residency law was constitutional.
Caldwell reversed Courtney and restored Leguía to the ballot. He relied on Arsenault v. Way, a 2021 federal decision striking down a nearly identical residency requirement for circulators of major-party primary petitions.
Caldwell concluded that continuing to apply the requirement only to independent and minor-party candidates would create an unequal system. The state later disclosed that election officials, in consultation with the attorney general, had stopped enforcing residency requirements for all nominating petitions following Arsenault.
Republican attorney Jason Sena argued that Caldwell still lacked the authority to disregard the law and that Leguía had failed to establish a valid constitutional challenge.
The Supreme Court ultimately accepted the procedural argument without deciding the broader constitutional issue.
Leguía received 3,784 votes when she ran against Kean in 2024. Kean defeated Democrat Sue Altman by 23,306 votes, but this year’s contest could be considerably closer. If Kean wins narrowly, he may owe some of the credit to Sena’s legal work removing a candidate whose Libertarian voters could otherwise have cut into the Republican’s support.
Her votes did not affect the result two years ago, but in a race that could be decided by a much smaller margin, Kean will not need to compete with a Libertarian for conservative-leaning voters.