On October 13, the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th circuit, upheld North Carolina’s ballot access requirement for independent candidates for U.S. House. The law requires signatures equal to 4% of the number of registered voters, or approximately 20,000 valid signatures in the typical district. UPDATE: here is the opinion.
The decision is very short and is unsigned. It says there is no way to diferentiate North Carolina’s law from the Georgia law upheld in 1971 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jenness v Fortson. Actually, that is not correct. In Jenness, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law because the plaintiff was running for statewide office, and the record showed that two statewide petitions had succeeded recently, one in 1966 by the Republican Party candidate for Governor, and one in 1968 by George Wallace.
By contrast, in North Carolina’s case, no independent for U.S. House has ever qualified, in the 110 years that the state has had government-printed ballots. The 4th circuit ignored three more recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions which say laws that are seldom used are probably unconstitutional.
Separate is NOT equal. Brown v. Bd of Ed. 1954
—
NOT brought up in Williams v. Rhodes 1968 and
Jenness 1971.
Result – the SHAM third party/independent ballot access stuff since 1968.
P.R. and App.V. —
ONE election day.
Equal ballot access.
— regardless of the EVIL robot party hack courts repeating their EVIL stuff back and forth to each other againa and again.
Is anyone actually surprised at such decisions?
Do you think the Supreme Court will reverse?
# 3 IF somehow the lawyers in the case get ANY brains about # 1.
Every election is NEW and has ZERO to do with any prior event since the alleged Big Bang a zillion years ago — EXCEPT the number of actual voters in the election areas involved at the preceding election — to have EQUAL nominating petitions — to show that preliminary support raved about by the SCOTUS folks.
This is a horrible decision.