U.S. District Court Refuses to Enjoin New Ohio Law Requiring Independent Candidates to Complete Petitions Within One Year

On March 20, U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley refused to enjoin a new Ohio election law that says independent candidate petitions must be completed within one year of the starting date. Duncan v Husted, southern district, 2:13cv1157. The decision says that the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken approvingly of ballot access schemes in which the petitioning period was even shorter than one year.

The only state interest the order mentions is that the state will do a better job of checking petitions if the petitioning period is limited to one year (the candidate chooses the one-year period). It says, “Defendant argues that the State has a strong interest in creating a fair and robust process for validating the signatures for every independent candiate, which can take a considerable amount of time and often results in the invalidation of many petition signatures. Thus the State alleges that the shorter, one-year time frame imposed by the amended statutes would make invalidation less likely.”


Comments

U.S. District Court Refuses to Enjoin New Ohio Law Requiring Independent Candidates to Complete Petitions Within One Year — No Comments

  1. I expected the Judge to side with the State as the State Capitol is within a few hundred yards of the District Court; so I plan to eventually get a Sixth Circuit appellate review. Richard Duncan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.