On October 18, the Montana Green Party filed this reply brief in Montana Green Party v Stapleton, 6:18cv-87. This is the case that challenges the unequal distribution requirement for the petition to qualify new parties, and the March petition deadline.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
One more UNEQUAL case.
The brief seems to focus on things like the use of state house districts rather than congressional districts as the basis for distribution requirements. I doubt that a court will buy into that as being significant. The SCOTUS certainly won’t since it was the Democratic Party that sued, claiming that they had a property interest in keeping competition off the ballot.
The real problem is that the district thresholds are based on the votes cast for the winning candidate for governor statewide in each district. Since a Democrat won, more signatures are needed in Democratic leaning districts than Republican leaning districts. This could be considered a bias against a left-leaning party, which would have to gain more signatures than if the threshold was based on the total electorate. If a Republican had been elected governor, the Green Party would have qualified. In two districts the requirement would have dropped from 150 to 45, while in another district it would have increased from 55 to 150.
In Montana, a Democrat winning statewide is somewhat anomalous.
The second problem is that the district caps are relatively mild (don’t reduce signature requirements much). If the All-Montana Party collected 50 signatures in EVERY district, they would meet the statewide requirement of 5000, but fail in 100 of 100 districts.
If they collected 107 signatures in each district, the number needed to ensure success in the minimum of 34 districts, they would collect 10,700 signatures statewide, more than double that needed, but just barely qualifying in 34 districts.
As it was, the Green Party only collected signatures in 47 districts (zero in a majority of districts), but still collected 7200 signatures statewide. They failed because they did not concentrate.
It is as if Montana were saying we don’t want a statewide party with statewide appeal. We only want parties with a narrow appeal to certain localities.
The Montana maldistribution requirement does not rise to the level of arbitrary and capricious, it only meets a standard of inane and moronic.
The plaintiffs brief does correctly note that the State’s brief mischarecterizes the decision in ‘Libertarian Party v Bond’. In that Missouri decision, a distribution requirement based on total votes cast in congressional districts was upheld, the court reasoning that votes cast is reflective of the number of available signers.
The Montana SOS brief claims that the Missouri requirement was based on votes cast for the successful gubernatorial candidate, and thus was equivalent to the Montana statute being challenged. This is FALSE.
The minority rule gerrymander OLIGARCHS [with various monarch agents] who control the USA LOVE to have more and more occult / byzantine machinations to STOP Democracy / Majority Rule.
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PR and Appv and TOTSOP
I think that distribution requirements are suspect, to begin with.
ALL subdivisions of a State are 100 pct arbitrary.
Too many MORON lawyers and judges to count.