On August 14, Herb Hoffman, independent candidate for U.S. Senate from Maine, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him on the ballot. Everyone agrees that more than 4,000 registered voters signed his petition to put him on the ballot, and that the petition was submitted on time. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court had removed him from the ballot because three people had testified that Hoffman had signed off on the petition sheets they signed (as the witness) but he wasn’t really watching. Hoffman didn’t need those 3 signatures, but the Maine Supreme Judicial Court had invalidated all the signatures from those three petition sheets.

Hoffman has an excellent attorney, but he still faces long odds. The U.S. Supreme Court has not intervened to put any candidate on the ballot since October 1990, when it ordered Cook County, Illinois, to put the Harold Washington Party on the ballot for county office. The U.S. Supreme Court denied all of Ralph Nader’s requests for injunctions in 2004. Hoffman is the first person since 2004 to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to issue injunctive relief.