On May 16, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Stengel held a hearing in Constitution Party v Aichele, e.d. 12-cv-2726. The purpose of this hearing was to decide exactly what rules apply this year for the minor party plaintiffs who already prevailed against the state’s policy of putting them at risk of paying up to $110,000 if their petitions are challenged.
The attorney for the Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties argued that because the law has been held invalid, the relief should be that the parties are put on the ballot automatically. The state argued that the parties still need to submit petitions. If the state prevails, though, the state elections department will have the work of checking the signatures, since the challenge procedure is void. The Elections Department has never before tried to validate signatures itself and may have trouble doing that. The state elections office is already under-staffed.
A decision is expected soon.
Validating petition signatures is not an overly difficult task. They could do a statistical sampling, which is what is done in a lot of states.
Judge Stengel displayed reluctance that he would rule to place the parties on the ballot as requested and seemed more likely to put the burden of validating the signatures on the Secretary of State or the Commonwealth. He stated several times the the state has a valid interest in maintaining some threshold to granting ballot access and that the 2% signature number itself is constitutional.
Not sure how this will play out regarding whether the state would just go and validate the signatures even excluding any objections, or if the petitions would still have to be challenged first and then the state would validate them. This is, of course, assuming the judge rules as I expect.
In either case, it would not release the parties from the burdens and costs of validating petitions. Anyone who has been involved in a court hearing to determine the validity of signatures knows that it is a very time consuming and exhaustive process to go through a petition line by line and look up each and every name. It goes quickly if you find the name you are looking for in the voter database, but all too often you can’t find the person at first, but then by checking variations of the spelling, or by looking up the address, you can find them. This takes extra time and it is unlikely the state, with its very limited resources, will give it that time. If they don’t find the name after 1 try, they will likely rule invalid. Thus the burden to prove validity will remain with the parties. All my opinion of course and we shall see where this goes.
Pennsylvania law requires that all write-ins be counted and tallied, but Pennsylvania election officials in many or most counties have been breaking that law for decades. It is time to put the county and state election authorities on notice that if any of the plaintiff parties don’t get on the ballot, they will sue over the failure to canvass their write-ins.
The petition signature valididation process in Pennsylvania is ridiculous (as in having to sit in court and prove as to whether or not each signature is valid).
If the Commonwealth would just make the signature requirement the same for all parties this probably wouldn’t be an issue.
The major party primary petitioning is held during a 3 week window during the winter, and only people who are registered to vote under the same party banner as the candidate may sign, and each candidate has to be on a separate petition page.
The minor party candidate ballot access petitions require more signatures, but they have about 5 1/2 months to gather the signatures, and any registered voter can sign them, and they can bundle multiple candidates together on the same petition page.
If they are going to have a petition signature requirement for ballot access, they ought to come up with a more reasonable method for verifying the validity of the petition signatures.
The state doesn’t want to make it easy…the could just say 500 sigs for US congress, 1000 for US senate, 2000 for President…and you get the pic..give everybody 2 months and let anyone sign..who cares about which party you are from, we should have a right to free access to the ballot, for everyone.
What is the Commonwealths deadline for submitting the 2% signature petitions?
Mark I think the PA deadline is August 1st
Every election is NEW
— regardless of ALL of the moron lawyers and judges involved in ballot access cases.