A subcommittee of the North Carolina House Election Law and Campaign Finance Committee will take testimony about HB 32, on March 2, Wednesday. The hearing will be at 1 p.m. in room 643 of the Legislative Office Building. The subcommittee is not expected to act on the bill at that meeting, but to provide a means for the public and the subcommittee to exchange views and information. HB 32 is the bill that eases ballot access for minor parties and independent candidates.
On February 24, the First Circuit ruled against the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, in the lawsuit that has been pending since 2008. The issues were whether a party has a constitutional right to protect its name, and whether it has a constitutional right to use a stand-in presidential candidate on its petition. Here is the 26-page opinion.
In 2008, the New Hampshire general election ballot carried two presidential candidates, both of whom had their names in the independent column, and both of whom had “Libertarian” next to their names. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire had sued, asking that only Bob Barr be labeled as “Libertarian”. The First Circuit says parties have no exclusive right to their name, and anyone is free to appear on the general election ballot with any party label he or she desires, even if the party label is the name of a qualified party. The First Circuit interpreted New Hampshire law to mean that anyone can submit an independent candidate petition and be placed on the November ballot as “Republican” or “Democratic”, even if that person is not registered in that party and did not run in that party’s primary (however, a primary loser would not be able to qualify for the November ballot as an independent).
Because the First Circuit interpreted New Hampshire law not to protect a party’s ability to limit its name to people actually nominated by that party, and because even the Republican and Democratic Parties cannot protect their names, there is no equal protection issue.
The First Circuit did not mention cases that the Libertarian Party had cited, which say that parties and even independent campaigns do have a First Amendment right to protect their name. These cases are Curry v Kennelly, a U.S. District Court decision from Connecticut that gave independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson exclusive right to the ballot label “Anderson Coalition”; and a 10th circuit decision, Baer v Meyer, which said that unqualified parties can protect their name from use by non-members.
The First Circuit also believed New Hampshire state officials, when they said in an affidavit that if an unqualified party submits a petition signed by a number of voters equal to 3% of the last gubernatorial vote, it gets its own party column. If a party has its own party column, that is clue to the voter that the candidate listed in the party column is really the nominee of the party, notwithstanding any competing candidates in the independent column who also use the party’s label. However, the only time in history that any unqualified party ever submitted a petition signed by 3% of the last gubernatorial vote was in 2000, when the Libertarian Party completed that petition. In 2000, the Libertarian Party was not given its own party column. The Libertarian Party’s brief pointed this out, but the First Circuit ignored that information. One presumes that in the future, the New Hampshire Secretary of State will honor his promise that groups that do the difficult party-petition do get their own party column.
On February 21, Common Cause of Connecticut, as well as some other organizations, asked the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear Green Party of Connecticut v Lenge, 10-795, the case in which the Green and Libertarian Parties challenge Connecticut’s discriminatory public funding. See the 32-page brief here. Common Cause hired Seth P. Waxman, a former Solicitor General of the United States, to submit its brief.
The brief says the Court should not take the case because there is no conflict among the lower courts on the issue of how much states can discriminate against independent and minor party candidates, when they provide for public funding. But, of course, this is because Connecticut is the only state that discriminates for or against any candidate (when it distributes public funding), on the basis of the candidate’s partisan affiliation or independent status. The brief characterizes minor party and independent candidates generally as “hopeless candidacies”, ignoring the fact that Connecticut voters elected an independent candidate to the U.S. Senate in 2006, and a minor party candidate to the Governorship in 1990. The brief also ignores the evidence in this case that 166 individuals were elected to state legislatures, or governorships, around the nation, in the 25 years before the case was filed, even though they were not the nominees of either the Democratic nor the Republican Party. There have been even more such candidates elected since the case was filed, including thirteen independent or minor party state legislators elected in 2010 alone, around the nation.
The state’s brief, asking the Court not to hear the case, is here.
The Daily Iowan, the campus newspaper for the University of Iowa, has this pair of op-eds. One advocates the National Popular Vote Plan and one opposes it.
On February 22, the Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee passed SB 602. This bill moves the non-presidential primary from July to June. It also moves the petition deadline for a new party from May 1 to March 1. It is not known if Oklahoma legislators know that a petition deadline that early would almost certainly be held unconstitutional.