On March 7, attorneys for the Oklahoma State Election Board filed this brief in Libertarian Party of Oklahoma v Ziriax, western district, 5:12-cv-119.
This case already has had a status conference, and the judge had urged both sides to settle the case, which challenges the March 1 petition deadline for new party petitions. The Libertarian Party had then suggested either a 30% cut in the required number of signatures (to compensate for the fact that the 2011 bill, moving the deadline from May 1 to March 1, deprived petitioning parties of two months of prime petitioning time, the months of March and April), or extending the deadline this year to May 1.
The state rejected this attempt to settle and did not make a counter settlement suggestion. Instead the state’s brief argues that the existing law is constitutional. It also suggests that perhaps the Libertarian Party petition submitted on February 29 might possibly have enough valid signatures, and therefore the lawsuit, as to the Libertarian Party, is moot. The state’s brief ignores the party’s offer to nominate by convention, thus saving the state the expense of printing up Libertarian Party primary ballots, and eliminating the need for such an early petition deadline.
Richard- Do you still feel confident the LP will win this?
Mr. Winger knows a great deal about ballot access, but his track record in such predictions is to be overly optimistic.
I don’t know how to say it any clearer. There are 17 court precedents saying that procedures to qualify a new party can’t be earlier than May. There are no reported precedents in the other direction.
Early petition deadlines have been in the US Supreme Court several times, and the US Supreme Court has always ruled against early petition deadlines. It did so in a summary affirmance in 1976 in Pennsylvania, in a case called Salera v Tucker. It did so in a summary affirmance in 1977, in a case called Lendall v Jernigan. Both decisions invalidated April petition deadlines.
The US Supreme Court invalidated Ohio’s March petition deadline in Anderson v Celebrezze, even though the number of signatures was only one-tenth of 1% of the number of registered voters.
Is it likely that any party other than Dems, Reps as well as AE and LP will get on the OK ballot this year?
#4, if the Oklahoma ballot access law for newly-qualifying parties is held unconstitutional, then there is no valid law (unless the legislature quickly passes a new one) and courts would then need to decide which political parties that claim to have a modicum of support should be put on the ballot.
“Modicum of support” especially in presidential election years, is influenced by how many other states a party is on the ballot. That is why the Green Party, and the Constitution Party, ought to be furiously getting themselves on the ballot of as many other states as they can.
I think AE turned in about 90,000 signatures, so they should make the threshold after checking.
I disagree with Richard (who says that holding the law to be unconstitutional would require the state to put all candidates somehow demonstrating a modicum of support directly on the ballot). The judge could hold the application of the law this year to have been unconstitutional, in that it was an ex post facto law and violated due process, and order the state to put the LP and Americans Elect on the ballot, in that they made a good faith effort to comply with the law, and then offer a mere dictum that the early filing deadline would probably be unconstitutional. This would put the legislature on notice and allow the legislature to try to device a scheme that would accommodate new parties with a May 1 deadline, and still enable the state to send absentee ballots to overseas military for party primaries, while not much interfering with the legislature’s scheme for this year’s election. One way to do do both things would be to have new parties nominate by convention, instead of by primary.
#7, I didn’t say “candidates”; I said “parties”.
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