On September 24, the state of New York filed this brief in U.S. District Court in the three federal ballot access cases pending in U.S. District Court. One case is filed by the Working Families Party; one by the SAM Party; and one by the Libertarian and Green Parties. SAM Party of N.Y. v Kosinski, s.d., 1:20cv-323.

The state’s brief doesn’t even mention the most important precedent in the case. New York vastly increased the requirements for a group to file a statewide petition, and the definition of a qualified party. The official reason for removing four parties form the ballot, and making it harder for them to get back on, was that New York now has public funding for state office, and if the minor parties were not removed, their candidates would qualify for public funding, which would cost too much money. But New York is in the Second Circuit, and the Second Circuit already ruled in a Connecticut Green Party case that states don’t need to provide equal public funding to minor parties. The new New York brief does not even mention that precedent, Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield.

The new New York brief claims the Second Circuit already ruled against the SAM Party (and by implication, all of the plaintiff parties) but the SAM Party case did not even mention the new statewide petition requirement. The state’s brief claims that as a matter of precedent, the new requirements are constitutional, but there are no precedents in the Second Circuit that uphold petition requirements similar to the new rules, and the most recent U.S. Supreme Court ballot access precedents insist that there is no litmus test separating requirements that are too high from requirements that are not too high, and that a court must study the evidence to see if the new requirements are needed.