More Chaos at the LNC Convention (Update)

The chaos at the Libertarian Party’s 2026 National Convention continued on Sunday. A motion to kick Jeremy Kauffman out of the hall straight-up failed to get the two-thirds vote it needed. Yet there he was, still credentialed, but magically locked out of the main floor anyway and unable to vote. Rules are rules, right? Except when the chair decides otherwise.

The drama kicked off right after the LNC Chair election wrapped up. Jeremy Kauffman, the outspoken head of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, had run on a wild platform: dissolve the whole national party and apologize to America for wasting everyone’s time, money, and energy. Surprise, it didn’t exactly make him popular. He got bounced in the first round with just 31 votes, conceded, and then dropped some post-concession comments that a lot of people called less than gracious toward the winner, Evan McMahon. That was all it took for someone to jump up and move to suspend the rules and boot him (and any mention of his wife) from the room.

Under the party’s own rules and Robert’s Rules of Order, this kind of move needs a solid two-thirds. The voice vote sounded like it passed at first. Then a counted division was called. Chair Steven Nekhaila, the outgoing LNC Chair, looked at the numbers and ruled the motion had failed. By the book, Kauffman was still a fully credentialed delegate with every right to be on the floor.

But here’s where it went south. Even though the assembly had just voted no on removing him, the chair didn’t let him back in. Security kept the door shut while the convention rolled on to other business, including a later vote on pulling out of the International Alliance of Libertarian Parties. People in the room described it as a straight-up ejection in everything but name. It was like the assembly’s “no” somehow got translated into “try the back hallway instead.”

If you check LP Convention Rule 2, it’s pretty straightforward: you have to be physically there on the floor to vote. No proxies, no remote anything. So by keeping Kauffman out, the chair basically turned a credentialed delegate into a very well-dressed spectator for the rest of the day. Nothing screams “maximum liberty” quite like that.

A bunch of folks immediately called it out as a problem. Under Robert’s Rules, the power to toss someone belongs to the whole body, not just the guy holding the gavel. Once the motion failed, the delegate should stay. Sure, the chair can keep order, but ignoring the vote and extending the punishment anyway feels a lot like the kind of arbitrary power libertarians are supposed to be against. The fix would have been a simple appeal of the chair’s ruling (majority vote only), but that apparently never happened.

Kauffman and his supporters wasted no time labeling the whole thing illegal and an obvious attempt to shut down the New Hampshire voice. Others figured his behavior had been rowdy enough that a little chair-side creativity was fair game, especially after the convention had already seen a lobby scuffle and an arrest earlier. Social media blew up, as it always does. One delegate posted the blunt version: “Jeremy Kauffman ejected from the convention.” Another just shook their head at the failed vote followed by the continued exclusion and called it peak libertarian procedural comedy.

As one New Jersey Libertarian Party member put it, remembering a past state convention incident: “We had an issue with a member one time at a state convention, but in the NJLP, we followed the rules. National could take a lesson from us, it seems.”

This all played out against the usual tension between national leadership and LPNH, which the LNC had censured the year before. Kauffman has a knack for stirring things up, so he’s an easy lightning rod. But the real issue here isn’t personal. It’s simple: if the delegates voted to keep him credentialed, why exactly was he still stuck outside?

Evan McMahon walked out as the new LNC Chair in the middle of all this chaos. His fans called it a fresh start focused on real growth. Critics just saw it as another chapter in the Libertarian Party’s long tradition of talking a big game about liberty while sometimes doing the exact opposite in the room.

At the end of the day, national conventions are supposed to be the highest authority in the party. When the chair seems to overrule a clear vote from the floor, it leaves everyone wondering about fairness and due process. Will this turn into formal appeals or just more memes and arguments? Okay, we know it’s going to end up as memes and arguments at least, but we will have to see if there is a formal complaint.

The full minutes should drop soon and maybe clean things up. Until then, the whole episode is a pretty good reminder that even in a party all about liberty and freedom, the rules still matter. And sometimes, how people bend them matters even more.