On July 9, a Montana state trial court removed the Green Party from the ballot, finding that it was 43 signatures short of the number needed. The state requires 5,000 valid signatures, and all sides agree that this requirement was met. But there must also be approximately 130 signatures from each of one-third of the legislative districts. The court found that nine signatures are invalid because the signer didn’t put the date; five signatures are invalid because the signer only signed, but didn’t also print; and invalidated six signatures that the state had thought were valid because, the judge wrote, the person who signed was not the person who was listed as the registered voter.
Here is the 19-page opinion in Larson v State of Montana, DDV-2018-2945. The Green Party has the option of now bringing a federal lawsuit, arguing that the March 15 petition deadline for new party petitions is unconstitutionally early. Montana has harsh winters, and there is no doubt that the party would have had enough valid signatures if the deadline had not been so early. The party collected additional signatures after the deadline had passed, and tried to submit them, but they were refused. If they had been accepted, the distribution requirement would have been met and the party would be on the ballot.
The Green Party already had a primary in Montana on June 5, and the votes were counted, so there is no problem identifying who the Green Party nominees are this year.
Similar early deadlines for new parties have been declared unconstitutional in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California (for purposes of the presidential election), Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah (in special elections).
Did the Democrats have anything to do with this? Republicans usually are behind efforts to remove the Libertarians from the ballot so that they don’t “steal” GOP voters. Just wondering.
SEPARATE-IS-NOT-EQUAL — Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954)
— regardless of ALL MORON ballot access cases since 1968
Very very minor hope the new SCOTUS person has a few more brain cells than the hacks in the last 50 years.
—
PR and AppV
It is the Democratic Party which filed the lawsuit, challenging the Secretary of State’s decision that the party had enough valid signatures. And the national Democratic Party brought in its own law firm to do the case.
Disgusting. I hope everyone on the left there refuses to support the Democratic nominees in their elections since they clearly don’t want competition. I’d urge every progressive in the state to contact the Democrats running and explain why you’ll not vote for them, period, unless they come out and attack their party over this blatant disgrace. “Give” all the elections to the Republicans, maybe they’ll learn then.
Greens = Divide and Conquer Doom for Donkeys
LPs = Divide and Conquer Doom for Elephants
Equal Doom under so-called *LAW* ??? — ie the ANTI-Democracy *LAW* of TYRANTS ???
The national Donkey lawyers in MT are the same lawyers in various Donkey gerrymander cases in various States.
WILL THE EVIL DONKEYs AND ELEPHANTs JOIN FORCES TO SMASH FLAT ALL MINOR PARTIES AND INDEPENDENTS
— to keep the oligarchy two party *tradition* going ??? Duh.
See Aug 1939 Stalin-Hitler plot to wipe out Poland >>>
World WAR II starts — 70 plus million DEAD in 1939-1945.
@DR,
Perkins Coie also was the conduit for Democratic funding of the Russian dossier.
The One Green ticket has feet on the ground in Montana for the Go Ogle 2020 POTUS write-in campaign with the United Coalition USA.
http://www.international-parliament.org/ucc-p7-usa.html
I will be running for President so to locate a female candidate for President, with whom I may be her Vice President as part of a United Coalition USA.
@Casual,
Montana statute permits anyone to file a petition. The Green Party posted its petition on its website, and invited supporters to sign and circulate the petition and to submit it to their county election officials. The county election officials check the petition to make sure the signer is a registered voter, and submit the counts to the SOS. Green Party officers apparently gathered a couple of 100 signatures in the summer of 2017. Just before the deadline this winter, some folks gathered seven thousand signatures and turned them in. These folks were allegedly from a Nevada consultant ordinarily associated with Republican candidates, and may have paid circulators. The Green Party said they did not pay anyone.
This apparently caught the Democratic Party off guard, because they could have/should have made any challenges with county officials. The Democratic Party and several individuals sued, claiming that they were injured by spending more money educating voters. The Democratic Party sued the SOS, claiming that they should not have taken the county election officials certifications. Perhaps if Linda McCulloch was still SOS, she would have instructed the county officials to be more diligent.
The Democrats also claimed that some signatures did not look like signatures, or did not look like signatures on file (county election officials are only required to check a sample of signatures).
While petitions are filed by county, the assignment to district is apparently done by the county officials. Montana has 100 House Districts, and about one million people, so the districts are quite small and there can about 10 districts in the larger counties.
The distribution requirement, rather than encouraging wide-spread support, in fact encourages concentrated support. If someone gathered 50 signatures from every district in the state, they would satisfy the statewide requirement, but not satisfy the district requirement in any district.
On the other hand, a party could satisfy the requirement in 40 districts, and instruct their circulators to throw any signers from the 60 other districts into a snowbank and also satisfy the statewide requirement. A court would have to decide whether a state may employ an irrational means to (not) achieve a rational goal.
Imagine a circulator gathered 300 signatures, when only required to collect 200, so as to account for unregistered voters, duplicates, etc. If instead the requirement was 150 signatures from each of two areas, you would likely need to collect more signatures. You are unlikely to have the same collection rate from both districts, nor have the same validity rate. The Montana distribution requirements make qualification more difficult despite discouraging statewide signature gathering.
In Montana, the Green Party initially had enough signatures in 38 districts, four more than the required 34 districts (34/100 is greater than 1/3 of all districts). The petitioners concentrated on four counties that contained enough districts to meet the distribution requirement: Yellowstone, Missoula, Cascade, and Lewis&Clark, which contain the “large” cities of Billings and Great Falls, the university city of Missoula, and the state capital of Helena. Collectively, they have about 40% of the Montana population.
Because the distribution requirement is based on the winning gubernatorial candidate, the distribution requirement in these counties was higher because a Democratic governor was elected in 2016, than if the Republican had been elected. Rural areas in Montana, other than the Indian reservations are very Republican. The university towns (Missoula and Bozeman), decaying mining towns (Butte), and the capital (Helena) are Democratic leaning, while Great Falls and Billings are competitive. Statewide, the Democratic governor was elected with 50.2% of the vote, but 45% of his votes were from the four counties, while only 35% of Republican votes were cast in those counties.
If the Republican had been elected, then the district requirements would be less. Circulators would still have concentrated on the large counties – because it is difficult to gather signatures in small towns when it is 20 below without the wind chill, and the only people on the street are those blown in from Alberta. But it would have been harder to knock the party off the ballot.
By knocking off 8% of signatures in 8 districts, the petition fell from 38 districts to 30 districts, four below the necessary 34. Presumably, they checked the other 30 districts, and decided that they could not successfully be challenged. This illustrates how much harder it is to meet a threshold in 34 districts. They did challenge a 39th district, but this had one signature fewer than the required number. Perhaps they were being careful in case a signature was added.
One category that Richard Winger did not mention, were signatures that were apparently falsely witnessed. One signer, who happened to work for the Democratic Party, had a discussion with the circulator, and managed to record the name of the circulator, who was female, as she signed. The person who signed the affidavit of witnessing the signature was male. All the signatures “collected” by the male were invalidated, about 40% of all invalidated signatures. The Democrats called the signer as a witness, and had pictures of the male circulator from Facebook as evidence.
It is possible that the female collected all the signatures, bur forgot to sign the affidavit, or some mixture.
Without the invalidation of these signatures, the petition would have barely failed due to more technical omissions, such as failure to print a name. An appeal based on these might have succeeded.
The Green Party was encouraging voters to run for nomination as write-ins.
This indicates that the refusal of Montana to provide Libertarian ballots violated the right to cast a write-in vote (It is immaterial that the threshold for qualifying was so high as to make this impractical. That simply means the threshold for qualifying as a write-in was too high).
It is possible that the Libertarian Party qualified for primary this year anyhow.
Montana’s practice of printing a separate ballot for each party is brain dead. Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Dakota have anonymous party affiliation, and don’t print separate ballots. The vote just checks a party box (or only votes for candidates of a single party) on the single ballot paper.
Better yet would be to switch to Top 2.
The duopoly does not want to be broken. People should be outraged by this decision regardless of which party you belong to. Why? It is another erosion of our civil liberties. We should not be forced to vote for parties we do not want to vote for. Period.