On September 27, U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May dismissed Cowen v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-4660. This is the lawsuit filed in 2017 by the Georgia Libertarian Party against the 5% petition requirement for U.S. House candidates who are not nominees of a party that had polled 20% of the vote in the last election. The petition is so severe, no party has ever managed to complete it, even though it has existed for 80 years.

The Eleventh Circuit had upheld the law in 2022, but the Eleventh Circuit had seemed to leave an opening to attack the law on Equal Protection grounds. The case returned to U.S. District Court. But now Judge May has decided that the Eleventh Circuit had even foreclosed an Equal Protection argument. Here is her 13-page order.

The only justification for the law that the Eleventh Circuit had mentioned in its 2022 order was the “compelling interest” a state has to keep candidates off the ballot if they don’t have a “modicum of support.” The Eleventh Circuit did not elaborate on that point. If this argument were true, every state in the nation would have a “compelling” reason to ban all candidates from all ballots who weren’t capable of completing a petition signed by 5% of the registered voters in that jurisdiction. This is truly absurd. No candidate for any statewide race, or any U.S. House race, in the last fifty years in any state, has managed to complete a petition of 5% of the registered voters.