On July 20, a Vermont Superior Court in Washington County upheld Vermont’s June petition deadline for independent candidates. Here is the 8-page decision. The decision rests on two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that did not deal with early petition deadlines, and ignores the two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that deal directly with early deadllines. The decision says that the U.S. Supreme Court said in Storer v Brown that candidates have no right to enter an election late. The decision says that Storer v Brown came out in 1986.

Actually, Storer v Brown came out in 1974, and did not deal with the issue of petition deadlines. Storer v Brown concerned a California law that set a September (of the election year) deadline for independent candidate petitions. The issue was not with the petition deadline, but with another California law that said no one could be an independent candidate who had not ceased to be a registered member of a qualified party a year before the primary.

Anderson v Celebrezze, which the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1983, struck down a March 20 petition deadline for independent candidates. The plaintiff, John B. Anderson, had been an independent candidate for President. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Anderson v Celebrezze is the decision most on point, and yet the Vermont decision does not discuss the holding of Anderson v Celebrezze. Plaintiffs will appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.

The Vermont decision does not mention that courts in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, have struck down independent candidate petition deadlines that were simultaneous with the filing deadline for candidates to get on a primary ballot (as the Vermont deadline is). The Vermont court did not mention any decisions other than U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

The Vermont decision says that the deadline is constitutional because many independent candidates complied with it, but in Anderson v Celebrezze, five independent presidential candidates had complied with the Ohio petition deadline in 1980, and the U.S. Supreme Court still said the deadline was unconstitutional. In other words, the constitutionality of early petition deadlines is not related to the question of how many candidates complied with the early deadline.