Democratic Congressional Candidate Files Federal Lawsuit Against Virginia’s Ban on Out-of-State Circulators

On April 4, Bruce Shuttleworth, a candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. House, 8th district, was told that he was 18 signatures short. He had submitted 1,823 signatures, but he was told that only 982 were valid.

On April 6, he filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, eastern district, complaining that his petition had been improperly rejected. Some of the signatures had been invalidated because one of his circulators lives in the District of Columbia. The Complaint does not directly attack the ban on out-of-state circulators, but does allege the ban is unconstitutional. The complaint also says, accurately, that after the district residency requirement was declared unconstitutional in Lux v Judd on February 8, there was no residency requirement whatsoever for petitioners. The old law said the circulator had to live in the district, and once it was declared unconstitutional, there was no law concerning the residency of circulators. When the legislature repealed the ban on out-of-district circulators, it added a requirement that circulators be Virginia residents, but the bills that did that, SB 613 and HB 1133 (identical bills) weren’t in effect when much of the petitioning was carried out.

Also, the complaint points out that even after the new law took effect, the State Board of Elections continued to give out misinformation.

On April 9, after the lawsuit had been filed, elections officials, working with Democratic Party officials, determined that Shuttleworth has enough valid signatures after all. Some of his petition sheets had been lost but were found again. It is not clear at this moment if the lawsuit will go forth. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge John A. Gibney, who wrote earlier this year in Perry v Judd that an in-state residency requirement is almost certainly unconstitutional. But Judge Gibney also declined to put Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum on the Democratic presidential primary ballot because he said the candidates had filed their lawsuit too late. Thanks to Scott Thomas for this news.


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