The 11th circuit will hold a hearing in Coffield v Handel on Thursday, March 4. The issue is the Georgia ballot access procedure for independent and minor party candidates for U.S. House. Georgia requires a petition signed by 5% of the number of registered voters. In practice, this requirement is so difficult, no one has been able to complete that petition, for U.S. House, since 1964. Back in 1964, the signatures were not due until October, and were not checked. Also no congressional district boundaries split any county, so it was easy for petitioners to know whether any potential signer was a resident of any particular congressional district.

The three judges will be William Barbour, James Edmondson, and Stanley Marcus. Judge Barbour is a visiting U.S. District Court Judge from Mississippi. He is a Reagan appointee and has never had a ballot access case involving minor parties or independent candidates (such cases don’t exist in Mississippi, because the ballot laws are so easy). He did have a case on residency requirements for initiative circulators. In Kean v Clark, 56 F Supp 2d 719 (1999), he upheld Mississippi’s requirement that initiative circulators live in the state, but he struck down a related law that said that requirement could be applied against an initiative campaign that had began working before the in-state requirement had been created.

Judge Edmondson, a Reagan appointee from Georgia, has never had a ballot access case involving the number of signatures. He was on a panel in 1997 in Natural Law Party v Massey, where the issue was whether Georgia had violated due process in 1996, by invalidating petitions on the grounds that many of the signatures had been notarized by a notary public who had herself circulated a few pages of the petition. The lower court had upheld the state. The 11th circuit panel on which Judge Edmondson sat had said the case is moot.

Judge Edmondson wrote the 2-1 decision in Chandler v Miller, upholding Georgia’s law requiring candidates for state and local office to take drug tests. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed the 11th circuit and struck down the law.

Judge Edmondson was on an 11th circuit panel in 1996 that upheld Florida’s July 15 petition deadline for minor party presidential petitions.

Judge Marcus is a Clinton appointee from Florida. In 1998 he wrote the decision in Socialist Workers Party v Leahy, 145 F 3d 1240, striking down a Florida law that required minor parties to post a bond. The lower court had upheld the requirement. Also, in Swanson v Bennett, an Alabama case challenging the number of signatures required for minor party and independent candidates other than presidential independents, at oral argument he seemed favorable to Swanson. He was skeptical that Alabama had any good reason for requiring 36,000 signatures for Swanson (an independent candidate for U.S. Senator) when Alabama only required 5,000 for independent candidates for president. But, in the end, he signed the decision upholding the law.