The U.S. Supreme Court has now docketed Kopitke v Bell, no. 20-897. This is the case over North Carolina’s independent presidential petition deadline of March 3. The Fourth Circuit upheld it last year, even though in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s March 20 independent presidential petition is too early. The Fourth Circuit said that the March deadline is constitutional because the North Carolina primary is in March. But the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts, have never said that the date of a state’s primary has anything to do with its independent presidential petition deadline. Here is the petition.

If it is true that the deadline for independent presidential candidates can be as early as that state’s presidential primary, then it would have been constitutional for New Hampshire in 2008 to have had an independent presidential deadline of January 8, because that was the date of the New Hampshire primary that year.