The West Virginia Constitution Party will file approximately 11,700 signatures in West Virginia on July 24. The requirement is 4,537. The petition is to be on the ballot for U.S. Senate. The party has never been ballot-qualified in West Virginia before, because that requires polling 1% for Governor, and it has never done that. Therefore, it must constantly petition.

The nominee is Don Blankenship, who ran in this year’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate. The law banning “sore losers” was unclear until this year, when the legislature passed HB 4434, which says that no one can be on the general election ballot as an independent candidate or the nominee of an unqualified party if he or she was registered in a major party earlier that year. But that new law didn’t go into effect until after Blankenship had started collecting signatures, and the party will argue that due process does not permit a state to make ballot access more restrictive in the middle of the petitioning period.