The Libertarian Party of Kentucky, referred to as "LPKY", is the official state affiliate of the Libertarian Party (United States). The purpose of the Party is to promote libertarianism and elect candidates to office. The Kentucky affiliate has existed since 1974, and is the third-largest political party in Kentucky. Since the Kentucky Secretary of State's office officially began asking county clerks to track the number of Libertarian voter registrations in 2006, via 31 KAR 4:150Archived September 11, 2016, at the Wayback Machine . As of November 11, 2020, 13,619 Kentucky citizens have registered Libertarian according to the Kentucky Secretary of State voter registration statistics.
After the election of 2020, and prior to 2016, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky was considered a "political group". An unpublished 2008 Kentucky Court of Appeals case stated that political groups are treated as Independents, as no other mechanism would exist for those groups to have their candidates placed on the ballot.[citation needed] Both Independents and political groups do not have automatic ballot access, meaning they must collect signatures on a petition for candidates that wish to run for office. Kentucky's ballot access rules require a different minimum number of signatures based on the office being sought, ranging between 25 and 5,000.
As a result of the 2016 general election results for president in Kentucky, the Libertarian Party was considered, under Kentucky Revised Statutes 118.015, to be a political organization for the years 2017 through 2020. Political organizations are those whose candidate for president received at least 2%, but less than 20%, of the popular vote in the state of Kentucky in the last general election. A "political organization", the second tier in a three-tier system, grants that party ballot access, but denies them a state-operated primary. The presidential race is the only metric used for ballot access in Kentucky, and there is no mechanism for a party to petition for access in Kentucky.
Candidates for partisan offices that wish to run as a Libertarian are nominated at a nomination convention, which can be, and historically has been, held in conjunction with the state party annual convention. A vote of registered Libertarians at convention determines who the candidate will be. All candidates must also defeat NOTA (None of the Above) in order to obtain the ability to run as a Libertarian. The LPKY State Party Executive Committee can vote to add additional candidates after the convention.
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