On October 23, the New York Daily News carried an editorial, criticizing the Second Circuit for refusing to give any ballot access relief to the Libertarian and Green Parties, and for not even explaining its reasoning. As the editorial notes, the opinion is one sentence long, saying there is nothing wrong with the U.S. District Court opinion earlier that upheld the 2020 ballot access rules.

There is much wrong with the U.S. District Court decision. It said that New York is justified in keeping minor parties off the ballot because otherwise the state would need to waste money on public funding for minor party candidates. This was fallacious because the Second Circuit had already ruled in a Connecticut case that if a state has public funding, it can restrict it to the major parties. Also, the U.S. District Court made errors of fact when it compared New York’s ballot access rules to the laws of other states. The U.S. District Court ignored all of the evidence that the minor parties had presented about the failure of New York to even have a procedure for a group to transform itself into a qualified party in advance of any election. The U.S. District Court didn’t discuss why the petitioning period should be squeezed into a six-week period, when a majority of state allow unlimited petitioning period.