On January 27, the Massachusetts Attorney General filed this brief in the State Supreme Court, in the lawsuit over whether the election law either permits or forbids using a stand-in presidential candidate on the ballot access petition of an unqualified party. The hearing will be February 9.

The state’s brief is quite long, but it never mentions that the Massachusetts Secretary of State approved vice-presidential stand-ins on petitions in 1980, 2000, and 2004, and presidential stand-ins in 1995. The brief does mention, in footnote six, that the Secretary of State’s office told the Massachusetts Libertarian Party in October 2007 that the office would prepare a form designed to facilitate presidential stand-ins, but says a promise to prepare a form for that purpose doesn’t really mean that the state would permit it. This is perhaps the weakest aspect of the state’s position, that it tricked the party into thinking presidential substitution would be permitted, and then, when it was too late, said it wasn’t permitted.

The state’s brief, like all the state’s briefs in this lengthy series of lawsuits, is sarcastic. It never refers to presidential substitution without using quotation marks around the word “substitution.” Massachusetts officials may not know this, but many other states permit presidential stand-ins on petitions, including Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Furthermore, almost every state permitted vice-presidential substitution in 1980 for John B. Anderson’s campaign.