On August 23, U.S. District Court Judge Aleta A. Trauger, a Clinton appointee, upheld the Tennessee petition requirement for parties to get on the ballot. The law requires signatures equal to 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, which this year is 43,498 signatures. Darnell v Hargett, m.d., 3:23cv-1266.
The decision is only twelve pages and says the law was already upheld a few years ago, in a case brought by the Green and Constitution Parties. Since then, however, the Sixth Circuit has struck down a Michigan petition requirement for statewide independent candidates that was only 30,000 signatures, in Graveline v Benson. The Michigan requirement was less than 1% of the last gubernatorial vote. Tennessee and Michigan are both in the Sixth Circuit, so the Graveline decision should have been binding.
Judge Trauger differentiated the Graveline case by saying that the plaintiff in that case had really tried to get on the ballot and had failed, and had therefore strong evidence that the Michigan law was too difficult. In the current Tennessee Libertarian case, the party did not make an effort to comply with the law.
In the past, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down or remanded cases involving petition requirements even if the plaintiff did not try to petition. That was true for Gus Hall in California in 1972 in Storer v Breown; Eugene McCarthy in 1976 in Texas in McCarthy v Briscoe; and the Socialist Labor Party in Ohio in 1968 in Williams v Rhodes. But the judge did not mention any of those cases.
This is exactly the kind of impediment which RFK Jr was railing against in his speech suspending his campaign. Instead of affording the American people the maximum opportunity to be able to hear from the panoply of political viewpoints that exist in this country and to vote for the candidates of their choice, we have a welter of ever-changing laws and judicial opinions expressly designed to maintain the two-party oligopoly. Instead of a marketplace of ideas we are continually subjected to a choice between the lesser of two evils. Despite the oft-repeated desire of the American people for a third party choice, court continue to support impediments the ability of third parties to get on the ballot.
Judge Trauger could have found for the Libertarian Party in this case using language she adopted in an earlier case she decided, League of Women Voters et al v. Tre Hargett, in which she wrote: “There is simply no basis in the record for concluding that the Act will provide much benefit to Tennesseans, and even less reason to think that any benefit will come close to outweighing the harms to Tennesseans (and non-Tennesseans) who merely wish to exercise their core constitutional rights of participating in the political process . . .”
Smart decision.