On September 23, the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in Arizona Green Party v Reagan, 14-15976, saying that the party’s challenge to the February petition deadline for new parties fails because the Green Party submitted no evidence that the deadline is harmful. The decision is only 18 pages long and lays great emphasis on the party’s lack of evidence.

Page 14 says, “We do not know how difficult it was for the Green Party to collect the required signatures, how much the signature-gathering effort cost, whether petition efforts diverted the Party’s resources from other endeavors, whether the ‘mind of the general public’ was diverted from the election at the time the Party sought to collect the signatures, how difficult it has been for new parties to comply with the deadline historically, or even if the Party attempted to comply with the deadline at all. Without evidence, the burdens identified in the Green Party’s complaint are purely speculative.

The case arose in the 2014 election, when the party was unable to obtain the needed 23,041 valid signatures by the February 28 deadline. It did finish the petition by May 2014, and sued at that time. The petition submitted in May 2014 did have enough valid signatures, and the state used the petition to put the party on the ballot for the 2016 election, so the effort wasn’t entirely wasted.