California Libertarian Partisan Campaign Network

Summary of Process for Getting on the Ballot

Qualifications for Office

For all partisan offices, you must be a citizen of the United States and a registered voter in California. In addition, for your name to appear on the ballot with the party label "Libertarian", you must be registered to vote as a Libertarian. (If you are registered with a party you have the option of appearing on the ballot without a party label, but not the other way around.)

For federal offices, there is also a minimum age requirement -- you must be at least 25 to be a candidate for US House, and 30 to be a candidate for US Senate.

For the state legislature, you must also be a registered voter in the particular district you are running to represent.

There are a few other requirements that don't apply to most Libertarians running for office, but if there is something unusual in your case like you lived out of the country for a significant amount of time or previously served in the same office then you probably should check all the details in the documentation provided by the Secretary of State.

Petition Signatures

Getting on the ballot for partisan offices always requires getting some signatures. There is a relatively small number required for "nomination" (65 for statewide offices, 40 for distrct offices), and a potentially much larger number that can help you reduce the filing fee (or if you get enough signatures, even eliminate the fee requirement completely).

There are two kinds of petitions that can be involved: a "nominating paper" which only can be used to satisfy the smaller minimum number, and a "Signatures-In-Lieu" petition that gives you credit toward the filing fee. But signatures on the SIL petition also count as nominating signatures (while signatures on the nominating paper do nothing to reduce the filing fee).

For the following reasons, you are almost always better off just using the SIL petition:

Signatures on the SIL serve both purposes for the same effort.
There is a longer period allowed to circulate the SIL petition. You can typically submit these kinds of petition pages any time during that period and get feedback on how many signatures are valid, which allows you to see how much work you still need to do.
The SIL circulation period is also earlier than the nominating period, so you can get started sooner, leaving more time if you run into problems.
There is no limit to how many SIL signatures you can turn in. If more than you expect are valid, and you wind up with "extras", that just means you will pay less for your filing fee. The "nominating paper", by contrast, in theory also has a maximum number you can submit, and if it turns out that too many of them are invalid the election officials may not be willing to accept more, or you may just not have time to collect more at that point.
You don't need to pay the filing fee to get the SIL petition. So if you somehow fail to get enough signatures by the end of that petitioning period, you have the option of just forgetting about the whole thing. But you must pay the filing fee before they will issue the "nominating paper", and if you fail to get enough signatures on that you probably won't get the fee back.

There are really only two cases in which you would want to collect signatures on the "nominating paper": (1) You somehow failed to get enough on the SIL petition. (2) You started too late to use the SIL petition. Try to avoid putting yourself in either situation.

You will need to get the SIL petition from your Registrar of Voters; they will fill in all the information about you and the office for which you are running, and record that they did this. They will probably only give you a few copies, but you are allowed to make additional copies yourself.

Do this as early as possible (by the end of December at the latest), start collecting signatures right away, submit them whenever you have a bunch of pages filled, and keep going until you have at least the 40 or 65 confirmed to be valid. Then you can keep going beyond that or not, depending on how you feel about the tradeoff between petitioning time and paying the fee.

To be valid, the signatures you collect must be from people who are registered to vote in your district, and the name and address of the person must be legible. If your district covers all or part of multiple counties, you can get signatures from people who live within your district in any of those counties, but you must collect the signatures from each county on separate pages, because the signatures from each county will need to be processe by the Registrar of Voters for that county.

These SIL petition sheets must be turned in to each county (the county where the signers on that sheet are registered) by 4 February.

Filing Fee

For each office there is a filing fee, which is calculated based on the salary of the office. So it can change from year to year, but not by that much. Following are the amounts for each office up in 2026:

US House	$1740.00
State Senate	$1346.94
State Assembly	$1346.94
Governor	$4918.58
Lieutenant Governor	$3688.94
Secretary of State	$3688.94
Controller	$3934.86
Treasurer	$3934.86
Attorney General	$4272.34
Insurance Commissioner	$3934.86
Board of Equalization	$1844.47

The actual amount you need to pay will be lower - either a bit lower or a lot lower, depending on how many valid signatures you got on the "Signatures-In-Lieu" petition.

You will most likely be required to pay this fee by check, made out to the Secretary of State, and since the actual amount won't in general be known at the time you file you will be asked to write the amount as "Not to exceed" the full amount. This may seem weird, but that's how they do it. The Secretary of State's office will fill in the actual amount before depositing your check.

Final Deadline

You must complete all of the steps to qualify for the ballot by the 88th day before the Primary, which for 2026 turns out to be 6 March. If you fail to do everything by this deadline, your name will not appear on the ballot, and you will have wasted all your effort to this point, as well as the filing fee. Do not get yourself in this position. Check and double-check all the steps, and if possible find somebody who has done this before to over it all with you as well.