On July 8, a Florida state trial court issued an opinion in Stark v Byrd, Circuit Court, 2nd district, Leon County, 2026CA-1311. This is the case over whether Paula Stark, an incumbent Republican member of the Florida legislature, should be on the Republican primary ballot. The judge ruled that she should not be on the ballot because she didn’t submit one particular campaign finance form. She alleged that her campaign treasurer had turned in the form and that the election office employee had handed it back. But the judge did not believe this claim, and thought it most likely that the campaign treasurer had not handed it in.

Stark can’t be a write-in candidate in November because it is already too late to file as a declared write-in candidate in Florida. Florida has the earliest deadline for filing as a write-in candidate in the nation. It somewhat defeats the purpose of having write-in space on the general election ballot for the deadline to be so early. As a result, no Republican will be on the general election ballot, and the Democratic nominee will be the automatic winner.

On July 6, the South Carolina Republican Party filed a federal lawsuit to obtain a closed primary for itself. See this story. The case is South Carolina Republican Party v Bolchoz, 3:26cv-2699.

UPDATE: here is the Complaint. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis, an Obama appointee.

The July 9 Indianapolis Star has an op-ed, “It’s too easy to start a new political party in Indiana” by Jacob Stewart, a Deputy Opinion Editor. He does not seem to have done much research into the topic.

Indiana is one of only two states in which it is impossible to create a new ballot-qualified party in a presidential election year (the other is New Jersey). Indiana is one of only eleven states in which it is impossible to create a ballot-qualified party in advance of any election (the others are Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia).

Indiana is one of ten states in which Ross Perot’s Reform Party was never a ballot-qualified party (the others were Alabama, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming).

Indiana is one of only three states in which the Green Party has never placed its presidential nominee on the ballot (the others are Oklahoma and South Dakota). Indiana is one of four states in which the Constitution Party has never been able to place its presidential nominee on the ballot (the others are Arizona, Georgia, and Oklahoma). Indiana is one of three states in which the Natural Law Party never placed its presidential nominee on the ballot (the others are Georgia and Oklahoma).

The op-ed says in Florida, a major party is one in which 5% of the voters are members. But he does not tell his readers that in Florida, a minor party can be on the ballot for all office, merely by filing a list of its officers and a copy of its bylaws. He suggests that perhaps the law should be amended to not recognize a party until it has received a contribution of $1 from as many as 37,000 people, but that principle seems to conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down poll taxes of as little as $3. It suggests that the law might require a party to have members in every county, but that would conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court decision Moore v Ogilvie, which struck down an Illinois law that forced minor party and independent statewide petitions to have 200 signatures from each of fifty counties (Illinois has 102 counties).