On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence F. Stengel issued a 22-page opinion in Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Cortes, 5:09-cv-1691, eastern district. The opinion says plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the Pennsylvania system of using courts to determine if petitions are valid, and assessing court costs against candidates whose petitions are deemed not to have enough signatures.

Judge Stengel didn’t even comment on the other three issues in the case. One issue was the systematic refusal of the Pennsylvania Department of Elections to tally write-ins, in most cases (for example, in 2008, the Department arbitrarily tallied the write-ins for Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, but refused to tally them for Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney). Pennsylvania has no procedure by which write-in candidates may file a declaration of candidacy, so in theory Pennsylvania ought to count all write-ins.

A closely related issue is that many counties in Pennsylvania don’t canvass any write-ins.

The other unmentioned issue in the decision is the 15% registration threshold for a party to be fully ballot-qualified. It is very likely that plaintiffs Constitution Party, Green Party, and Libertarian Party, will appeal.