On May 17, the Seventh Circuit upheld the new Illinois ballot access restriction for qualified parties that was passed in 2009. Before 2009, a ballot-qualified party had the ability to nominate someone by committee or convention, in instances at which no one had appeared on the March primary ballot and no one had been nominated by write-ins at the primary. Starting in 2009, the law said that when a ballot-qualified party has no primary nominee and wants to choose someone after the primary by party meeting, the chosen candidate must submit a petition within three months after the primary.

The Republican Party is weak in Chicago, and had very few candidates on its own primary ballot for the legislature in 2012. Primary ballot access in Illinois requires a fairly difficult petition. The Republican Party, after the primary, nominated seven legislative candidates in districts in which no one had appeared on its primary ballot. But the candidates were not able to obtain the needed signatures (1,000 for State Senate and 500 for State House), so the candidates filed a lawsuit, charging that there was no good reason to require them to submit petitions.

The U.S. District Court had ruled against the plaintiffs on the grounds that they had filed the case too late, and did not settle the declaratory relief question. The candidates appealed, and the Seventh Circuit upheld the new law. The Seventh Circuit decision is stunningly illogical. The Seventh Circuit said that without the petition requirements at issue, the ballot might be flooded. It mentioned that 135 candidates for Governor appeared on the ballot in California in the special gubernatorial election in 2003. It said that voters in Palm Beach County, Florida in 2000 were confused because there were ten candidates on the ballot for President. All of this is beside the point. The law being challenged in this case only related to the ability of a ballot-qualified party to place a nominee on the ballot. There were only two ballot-qualified parties in Illinois in 2012. So even if the petition requirement had been struck down, or hadn’t existed, at most only one additional candidate would have qualified for the November ballot.

The Seventh Circuit opinion says, “The plaintiffs point to the fact that, since only the Democratic candidate met the statutory scheme’s criteria for ballot placement in some 2012 state legislative races, ballots in the relevant districts listed only the Democratic candidate’s name for these offices…How, the plaintiffs ask, can voters be confused if only one name is printed on the ballot? The plaintiffs question overlooks the possibility that relaxing or abolishing these signature requirements could attract a significant number of frivolous candidates, leading to phone book-sized ballots and widespread voter confusion.” The case is Navarro v Neal, 12-3572. Thanks to Robert Allensworth for this news.