On October 4, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued this 7-page opinion in In re:  the Nomination Petitions and Papers of Carl Stevenson, 54 MAP 2010.  Carl Stevenson is an independent candidate for the legislature.  The issue is whether a Pennsylvania law making it illegal to circulate a petition outside the circulator’s home district is constitutional.  The Commonwealth Court had ruled that the law is constitutional, and had invalidated the petition because so many of the petitions had been circulated by someone who lives in another Pennsylvania legislative district.  UPDATE:  see this commentary about the case.

The Supreme Court sent the case back and told the Commonwealth Court to finish the process of validating all signatures.  There is a possibility that Stevenson doesn’t have enough valid signatures, even if the signatures collected by the out-of-district circulators are counted.  If Stevenson doesn’t have enough valid signatures even when those are counted, no court in this case then needs to decide the constitutional issue.  But if Stevenson does have enough signatures, then the state courts in this case must grapple with the constitutional issue.

It is true that the Commonwealth Court had superficially upheld the residency requirement, but the State Supreme Court order seems to think that the Commonwealth Court didn’t really settle the issue.  The Supreme Court order says, “Neither the lower court nor appellees (i.e., the challengers) have forwarded any substantive justification of the court’s rejection of appellant’s First Amendment argument…The Court never offered any substantive evaluation of First Amendment principles to support its rejection of appellants’s argument, and the cases it cites likewise do not engage the merits of appellant’s First Amendment argument…The Court, in short…didn’t engage his arguments in meaningful fashion…There is nothing in the record or the pleadings below providing a basis for this Court to affirm the existing decision removing appellant from the ballot.”

The last paragraph of the Supreme Court asks the lower court to hold an “immediate hearing” with the word “immediate” in bold type.  The Commonwealth Court has already set a hearing for Thursday, October 7, at 1:30 p.m. in Harrisburg.