On August 17, U.S. District Court Judge Mark H. Cohen, an Obama appointee in Georgia, directed attorneys for Georgia to respond by August 23 in De La Fuente v Kemp, n.d., 1:16cv-2937. The issue is the constitutionality of the law that requires petitioning groups for president to file their presidential elector candidates with the state several weeks before the petition itself is due. Georgia does not print the names of presidential elector candidates on the ballot. Presidential petitions contain the names of the presidential elector candidates, so De La Fuente argues that there is no state interest in requiring him to have submitted the names before the petition itself was due. A somewhat similar law in Arizona was overcome by the Green Party earlier this year.
On August 18, U.S. District Court Judge Sue E. Myerscough, an Obama appointee in Illinois, expedited the lawsuit Gill v Scholz, c.d., 3:16cv-3221. The state’s brief is due August 22, and a hearing is set for August 24 at 1:30 p.m. in Springfield.
The issue is the Illinois 5% petition requirement for independent candidates for U.S. House. The plaintiff, David Gill, an independent candidate in the 13th district, submitted over 11,000 signatures. He needed 10,754, but he was challenged and it was determined that only 8,593 signatures are valid. He is charging that the 5% petition for U.S. House is so restrictive in practice that it is extremely rare for any candidate for U.S. House to ever get that many valid signatures.
Only four states require an independent for U.S. House to submit as many as 10,000 signatures. They are Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. No one has ever complied with the Georgia requirement or the South Carolina requirement since those states have required as many as 10,000 signatures. No one has ever complied with the North Carolina requirement either, except in 2010 when a petition for Wendell Fant was submitted. The petition effort had been organized by the Service Employees International Union, which employed an army of petitioners to get the job done, although once the petition had been approved, Fant refused to run, so his name did not appear on the ballot.
Hasn’t this been challenged before and upheld?
How many phone calls from the HACK judges to the White House and Donkey HQ in DC on what to write in the various cases —
i.e. will such and such HELP or HURT Clinton — in the DIVIDE and CONQUER election WARS in the various States ???
In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s petition requirements for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties. That requirement was a petition of 5% of the number of registered voters. That case was Jenness v Fortson. The Court was persuaded that such petitions couldn’t be that difficult, because the evidence was that a statewide petition had succeeded in Georgia in both 1966 (the Republican nominee for Governor) and 1968 (George Wallace’s American Party petition). Since then the Court has come to realize it may have made a mistake, so it has been saying ever since 1974 that there is no “litmus test” to decide if a petition requirement is too severe or not. Lower courts are supposed to analyze how many petitions have succeeded, and if few do, then the law is probably unconstitutional.
One HUGE difference between Jenness and Gill’s case: the Georgia law allowed petitioners 180 days to collect the signatures, while Illinois law limits petitioners to half that, a mere 90 days. At the rate per day Gill collected “valid signatures”, he would have had enough in another 23 days, and he would have been way over the top with an additional 90 days!