Wieslaw Niemoczynski, the Monroe County (Pennsylvania) Chief Public Defender, says in this news story that he will challenge the system for checking signatures in Pennsylvania. On August 21 his own petition to be an independent candidate for Common Pleas judge had been invalidated, not because he didn’t have enough signatures of registered voters, but because of irregularities in the way addresses are recorded in the Pennsylvania SURE voter registration database.

The article quotes several Pennsylvania state legislators as saying there is nothing they can do about the problem. That is a surprising statement, since bills are pending in both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature to sharply reduce the number of signatures needed for independent candidates. The bills are bottled up in committees.