A five-year-old federal court ruling over who can collect signatures for political candidates has become central to a fight over whether a Libertarian congressional candidate can appear on the ballot in one of New Jersey’s most competitive districts.
The case, Arsenault v. Way, began with a straightforward question: Can New Jersey prohibit people who live in other states from circulating nominating petitions?
In 2021, U.S. District Judge Peter Sheridan concluded that the answer was no — at least when it came to a state law governing major-party primary elections.
New Jersey required people collecting signatures for presidential primary candidates to live in the state. That restriction created problems for professional petition circulators Alexander Arsenault and Trenton Pool, neither of whom was a New Jersey resident.
It also affected presidential candidate Rocky De La Fuente, a California car dealer who hired Pool to collect signatures for his 2020 Republican primary campaign. De La Fuente sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 and then ran as an independent under the Reform Party and American Delta Party; he founded the latter party. He also ran for the U.S. Senate in Florida and for mayor of New York City in 2017, despite his California residency. In 2018, he ran for U.S. Senate in nine different states. After initially announcing as a Democrat, he switched parties and ran as a Republican in 2020; he also ran in GOP primaries for Congress in California, Florida, and Texas.
Because Pool could not circulate petitions himself or find enough qualified New Jersey residents to do the work, De La Fuente did not qualify for the state’s presidential primary ballot.
The circulators and De La Fuente sued then-Secretary of State Tahesha Way, arguing that the residency requirement violated their constitutional rights.
They argued that collecting signatures involves more than moving paperwork around: it requires talking to voters about candidates and encouraging political participation, activities protected by the First Amendment.
New Jersey defended its restriction as a way to prevent fraud, protect political parties, and ensure that petition circulators could be investigated if problems arise.
But Sheridan found that the state had not demonstrated why barring out-of-state circulators was necessary. The circulators offered to submit to New Jersey’s jurisdiction, meaning investigators could still pursue suspected misconduct.
The judge said the residency requirement “is unnecessarily restrictive and does not survive strict scrutiny.”
His ruling invalidated only the residency portion of the primary-election statute, leaving its other requirements intact.
The decision later took on broader importance.
In April, Secretary of State Dale Caldwell applied Arsenault to a congressional primary dispute involving Democrat Sue Altman, allowing signatures collected by Princeton University students registered outside New Jersey to count. Weirdly, Sam Wang, a professor at Princeton, mounted the challenge.
The more difficult question arose in the 7th congressional district, where Libertarian Lana Leguía submitted petitions that included hundreds of signatures collected by New York residents.
Caldwell concluded that the reasoning behind Arsenault should also protect independent and third-party candidates. Republicans challenged that conclusion, arguing that Arsenault addressed a different statute governing primary elections and did not automatically invalidate the separate residency requirement applicable to general-election petitions.
The dispute is not about whether the people who signed Leguía’s petitions were qualified New Jersey voters. It is about whether otherwise valid signatures can be discarded because the people collecting them lived across state lines.
That distinction has left courts confronting a question Arsenault did not directly resolve: whether protections already extended to major-party candidates must also apply to candidates outside the Democratic and Republican parties.
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October 19, 2018 -
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