On September 6, the Vermont Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ruling of a lower state court that put the Justice Party and its presidential nominee, Rocky Anderson, on the ballot in 2012. The case is Anderson v State of Vermont, 2013-vt-73. Here is the nine-page opinion.

Vermont allows a petition sheet to include signers from different towns. But, Vermont requires the petitioning group to submit the original sheets to each town clerk, and then to come back later and collect the sheets from the town clerks and give them to the Secretary of State. The Justice Party wanted to make photocopies of each petition sheet that had signatures from more than a single town. The purpose of the party’s desire to make photocopies, was that if a sheet had signatures from two towns, then the party could give the original sheet to one of the town clerks, and the photocopy of that same sheet to the other town clerk.

The state forbade photocopying the sheets before submission, so that the party had to take such a sheet to the first town, and then, after the first town clerk had finished checking that sheet, the party had to take the same sheet to the second town clerk, and have that clerk work on that same form. This not only required a lot of driving between towns, it consumed valuable time. The State Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that the ban on photocopying was harmful to the group and not really necessary.