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DES MOINES, Iowa (KCRG) - The Iowa Supreme Court ruled three Libertarian candidates for Congress will not be on the November ballot.

 

https://www.kcrg.com/2024/09/12/iowa-libertarian-congressional-candidates-say-race-isnt-over/

 

The Court agreed with the State Objection Panel’s decision to keep Libertarian candidates in the First, Third, and Fourth Congressional Districts off the ballot.

 

That ruling came after a challenge was filed by a group of Republican voters who claimed the Libertarian Party held county conventions the same night as their precinct caucuses, which is against state law.

 

“It essentially boiled down to we did county conventions 3 hours too early,” said First District Congressional candidate Nicholas Gluba who is challenging Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannan.

 

“Three hours is a negligible amount in my opinion, and I would say probably the opinions of most people that are of voting age.”

Gluba says the ruling does not mean the end of his campaign.

 

He says he and Third District Libertarian candidate Marco Battaglia and Fourth District candidate Charles Aldridge will launch a write-in campaign for the November election.

 

“We are fully intending to be write-in candidates,” he said.

 

“We’ve started to activate all across the state to look into what all we need to do for write-in candidacy.”

 

Lawyers for the Libertarian candidates never argued that they may have violated the letter of Iowa election laws regarding the timing of their nominating conventions, which was at the heart of the challenge.

 

Instead, they argued the punishment for the technicality should be imposed on the party not the candidates.

 

Gluba, who works part-time as a chef and hasn’t run for office before, says he’s learned that politics is a cutthroat business.

“I work in logistics and I work as a chef,” he explained.

 

“Politics is by far the most cutthroat out of those things. Which is funny because in one of those (jobs), we work with extremely sharp knives at all times.”

 

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