On May 2, the National Democratic Party dropped its lawsuit against the order of candidates on Arizona general election ballots, and on June 2, the court approved the withdrawal. Mecinas v Hobbs, 2:19cv-5547.

Democrats had won an important procedural victory in this case on April 8, 2022. The Ninth Circuit had ruled the party does have standing to challenge the law, which says that in most parts of the state, Republicans are listed first on the general election ballot. The Ninth Circuit sent the case back to the U.S. District Court, which had said the party doesn’t have standing.

This is the only one of the Democratic Party’s six 2020 lawsuits on ballot order that seemed likely to win, but apparently the Democratic Party decided the case wasn’t worth the expense of a trial. The party lost lawsuits in Texas, Florida, Georgia, West Virginia, and Minnesota. The decisions in Texas, Florida, and Georgia had said ballot order is a “political” question that the courts can’t adjudicate.

If anyone challenges the Arizona law on ballot order in the future, the case will begin with a clean slate. The Democratic Arizona case was dropped “without prejudice.”

On June 6, a 3-judge U.S. District Court issued an opinion in Goldman v Brink, e.d., 3:21cv-420. This is the case over whether Virginia is violating the U.S. Constitution by using legislative districts based on the 2010 census, instead of the 2020 census, until the November 2023 election.

Virginia elects legislators in odd years. Of course new districts based on the 2020 census couldn’t have been used for the regularly-scheduled November 2021 election, because the census data was late, due to covid. The issue was whether Virginia should hold special elections in November 2022 using districts based on the 2020 census.

The court said the plaintiff lacks standing, because it happens he lives in a district in which the population is smaller than the ordinary district. Therefore he can’t argue that he is being personally harmed. If he had lived in an over-populated district, the case could have proceeded to the merits. The plaintiff claimed he had standing as a potential legislative candidate, but he didn’t actually get on the ballot in 2021, nor did he appear to make concrete plans to run in a potential 2022 election either. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.

On June 6, Perry Johnson, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, filed a federal lawsuit seeking to be put back on the August 2 primary ballot. Johnson v Michigan Board of State Canvassers, e.d., 2:22cv-11232. The issue is whether the state used due process when it invalidated his petition. He needed 15,000 signatures and he submitted 23,193. But the state determined that many of his petitioners committed fraud, and invalidated all of the signatures collected by those individuals, without checking each signature. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news. Here is the Complaint.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Goldsmith.