On June 10, Michael Collier, an independent candidate for Lieutenant Governor, filed a federal lawsuit against the law that only gives him 30 days to collect 81,030 signatures. Normally independent candidates in Texas have 113 days to collect signatures. However, the law says if the office has a primary run-off, signatures can’t be collected until the day after the run-off. Collier v Nelson, w.d., 1:26cv-1574. Here is the Complaint.
The lawsuit (Paragraph 29, 30) is inaccurate with regard to the 1903 Terrell Election Law, first applied in 1904. In 1904, voters were given a ballot for each party. They would take the six ballots into a voting booth, select one and dispose of the others. This is similar to the pick-a-party primary in Montana, except this would be for the general election.
For each office, there would be a party nominee, followed by a write-in line. Thus a Libertarian Ballot would have:
Governor
Pat Dixon
_________
…
The Republican ballot
Governor
Greg Abbott
___________
…
and so on for other parties.
If you didn’t like the nominee of your party, you could scratch out his name, and write-in the name of another person. This could have hypothetically been an “independent” candidate, or a nominee of another party. It was like a party column ballot with the party columns snipped apart. This manner of voting for an “independent” candidate was the same as before there were government-printed ballots. While a voter might produce his own ballot, more typically political parties would print ballots with the names of their nominees and distribute them to voters. Voters were free to edit these ballots, though most voters typically did not.
In a 2026 version of this ballot, a voter could take a ballot of one of the parties, cross out Dan Patrick, Vikki Goodwin, Kevin McCormick, or Anthony Cristo, and write “Mike Collier” on the write-in space.
The political parties were responsible for paying for their ballots. This led to some confusion or controversy. Texas elections are conducted by counties. The SOS is only responsible for coordinating them. In this election, the SOS sent each county a set of ballot facsimiles for the six parties with statewide candidates, which in 1904 included Democratic, People’s, Prohibition, Republican, Socialist, and Socialist Labor.
In general, the Democratic Party had candidates for all offices. The Republicans had candidates for statewide office, and some local offices. The other parties might have a candidate or two in a few counties. The People’s Party had a congressional candidate in one district with seven counties.
The payment for ballots was due when a party delivered its nominees for all non-statewide offices. At that time, nominations for a multi-county office had to be delivered in each county. The Democratic Party paid in all counties. Because the Republican party had congressional candidates in 13 of 16 districts, they would have delivered those nominations along with the ballot-printing fee in each county. In Bastrop County, they had no congressional candidate and no local candidates. Nonetheless they were assessed a fee of $30.60 for printing ballots. But the Attorney General issued a ruling that in counties with no candidates for a minor party that the county commissioners should pay the cost of the ballots.