On June 8, a lawsuit was filed in Arizona state court, seeking a court order to remove Mayor Marlin Kuykendall from the ballot in Prescott’s mayoral election of August 30, 2011. The election is non-partisan. Kuykendall was first elected Mayor in 2009 and he is running for a second term.

The lawsuit argues that he should be off the ballot because he didn’t personally sign his campaign’s Statement of Organization. See this story, which has links to some of the briefs. The case is Wilson v Burke, Yavapai County Superior Court, P1300-cv-2011-00972.

Arizona permits write-ins in all elections. Unfortunately, in 2005, the legislature passed a law saying any candidate whose ballot access petition fails for any reason cannot be a declared write-in candidate. That law was the idea of Jan Brewer, who was Secretary of State at the time. It was directed at Ralph Nader, whose ballot access petition had failed in 2004. Nader did successfully file as a write-in in 2004, and his write-ins were tallied, but then the law was changed to stop write-ins in future elections for candidates who had tried to petition.