In 2002, a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled that state law, telling circulators for district office that they cannot work outside of the district they live in, is unconstitutional. The case was Morrill v Weaver, 224 F Supp 2d 882. The state did not appeal.
Notwithstanding that, the state still is not permitting circulators to work outside their home U.S. House district, if those circulators are circulating a presidential primary delegate petition. The state is using the technicality that the 2002 court victory related to the Green Party’s petition to get various candidates on the November ballot. Of course, the decision was based on the First Amendment right of individuals to petition their government and to engage in political speech. In this context, there is no meaningful distinction between district petitions for minor party ballot access to the November election, and district petitions to the primary ballot.
Jonathan Marks, Chief of the Pennsylvania Elections Division, denied the request to let presidential primary delegate petitions be circulated outside the circulator’s home district on January 25. It is not known if any presidential candidate will sue to overturn the ruling. Pennsylvania requires presidential primary candidates to submit a statewide petition of 2,000 names, and then separate petitions of 200 signatures for delegates in each US House district.
Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has clearly stated in Zulick and other cases that the Pennsylvania courts are not bound by any decision in the lower federal courts (read “Non-Supreme”) except when addressing the specific plaintiffs and defendants in the specific federal court ruling. In Zulick the Commonwealth Court, during the hearing, admonished the PA Bureau of Elections for relying on Patriot Party v Allegheny County as reasoning to provide Nomination Papers to Zulick.
We had a similar problem in New York, where we had to go to court to strike down the residency requirement for petition circulators for independent and new-party candidates, even though an identical requirement for recognized political parties had already been struck down. If someone sues, the Dept. of State might not put up much resistance. They must be tired of being jerked around by the state and federal courts.
Translation (from the Pennsylvania Division of Elections): We don’t give a damn what the Constitution or some court ruling says, we’ll do what we damn well please to make ballot access more difficult than necessary so we can keep competition out.
The PA Dept. of State used to be pretty good about drawing logical conclusions from the decisions of the federal courts. It could be that the Rendell administration has brought about a change of policy, but the _Zulick_ decision seems like the more likely culprit.
Actually, if I was a PA candidate facing this situation, I might prefer at this point to have the DoS enforce the letter of the law. That way, I could sue in federal court (historically friendly to ballot access) and almost certainly win based on the _Morrill_ precedent. Whereas if the DoS followed _Morrill_, my opponents would probably sue in Commonwealth Court (historically hostile to ballot access) and procure a bad ruling, as happened in _Zulick_.
The Dept of State has typically been cooperative and easy to deal with — my personal experience with 5 state wide petition drives and a number of lower tier candidates. But in Zulick we had a Commonwealth Court Judge state from the bench while the court was in session that the state had the duty to protect the two-party system. Note that all Commonwealth, Superior and State Supreme court Judges in Pennsylvania are elected in partisan elections.