On May 31, U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee, refused to dismiss the lawsuit Conforti v Hanlon, 3:20cv-8267. This action keeps the case alive. It was filed to overturn the New Jersey election procedures that give some candidates in primaries a much better ballot position than certain other candidates preferred by the party organization. Here is the 39-page order.
The New York petition deadline for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, was May 31. It appears that six statewide petitions were submitted: the Libertarian, Green, Independence, Freedom and Unite statewide candidates, and independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare.
The nominee of the Unite Party is Harry Wilson, who is also seeking the Republican nomination later this month. The nominee of the Freedom Party is Skiboky Stora, who originally tried to get on the Republican primary ballot for Governor but did not succeed.
On May 31, this brief was filed in Ritter v Migliori, 21A772, in the U.S. Supreme Court, by the advocates of counting ballots in which the voter had forgotten to add a date next to his or her signatures on the outer envelope of postal ballots.
The North Carolina Green Party has collected the needed 13,865 valid signatures to be on the ballot for 2022 and 2024, according to this news story. This is the highest petition requirement that any state Green Party has met since 2016, when it overcame the Illinois requirement of 25,000. Thanks to Chris Cole for the link.
This is the first time the Green Party has ever successfully petitioned in North Carolina. It never appeared on the ballot in that state until 2018, and it was on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 because of a 2017 law that put all parties on the ballot automatically if their presidential nominee had been on the ballot in at least 35 states in the preceding presidential election.
In North Carolina, when a party gets on the ballot in a midterm year, it is also automatically on the ballot for the following presidential year.
On May 27, a 3-judge U.S. District Court ordered Ohio to use legislative district maps that had been chosen by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, even though that plan had been rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court as an unconstitutional gerrymander. Here is the opinion in Gonidakis v LaRose, s.d., 2:22cv-773.
The vote is 2-1. The legislative primaries will be held on Tuesday, August 2. Independent candidates for the legislature have until August 1 to submit their petitions. The majority decision is signed by Judges Amul Thapar and Benjamin Beaton, Trump appointees. The dissent is by Judge Algenon Marbley, a Clinton appointee.
