On November 26, the U.S. Supreme Court held a conference to decide which cases to accept. A few hours later, the Court announced that it is taking four particular cases, none of them election law cases. This probably (but not certainly) means that the Court won’t hear Judd v Libertarian Party of Virginia, 13-231. That case was on the Court’s conference list for November 26.
The Court won’t say which cases from its November 26 conference it rejected, until Monday morning, December 2. Because the Virginia case wasn’t accepted today, chances are very high that it will be on the December 2 list of cases rejected. But sometimes the Court puts a case on its conference and can’t decide whether or not to hear that case. So it is still possible that the Court will hear the Virginia case. If the Court hasn’t yet made up its mind about that case, next week it will re-list it for a future conference date.
Judd v Libertarian Party of Virginia is the case over the constitutionality of bans on out-of-state circulators. The U.S. District Court, and all three judges on the Fourth Circuit, had rejected Virginia’s ban, so Virginia then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts.
Another election law case that was on the November 26 conference, and which will also probably be rejected when the December 2 list is published, is Nader v Federal Election Commission, in which Ralph Nader argued that he does have standing to sue the FEC. He had sued the FEC because the FEC did not require the Democratic National Committee and its allies to report their expenses in keeping him off the ballot in many states in 2004. The U.S. Court of Appeals said Nader doesn’t even have standing, and Nader had hoped to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse that opinion.
So does this mean that if the US Supreme Court does not hear the case, that Virginia’s ban on out-of-state petition circulators remains struck down?
If so, will this strike down out-of-state petition circulator bans in other states?
If the US Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, Virginia’s ban will be dead. But that will have no effect on any other state. Because the Libertarian Party won the case in the 4th circuit, the 4th circuit decision would have wiped out any bans on out-of-state circulators in all the states in the 4th circuit. But it just happens that the other states in the 4th circuit don’t have such bans anyway. West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina, are the other states in the 4th circuit. So the only practical effect of the Virginia case is that Virginia’s ban will be eliminated, assuming that the US Supreme Court really does reject the Virginia appeal on December 2, which is likely.