On August 5, U.S. District Court Judge James C. Dever issued an opinion in North Carolina Green Party v North Carolina State Board of Elections, e.d., 5:22cv-276. It puts the Green Party’s 2022 nominees on the November ballot. Although the State Board of Elections on August 1 had recognized the Green Party as a qualified party, the candidates still weren’t on the ballot because the state law says their names must be certified by July 1 of an election year. The candidates were chosen by convention and the party had met this deadline, but the Board hadn’t recognized the party by July 1, so without this federal court order, the candidates would have missed the deadline.

The order says the July 1 deadline is a severe burden, under the circumstances of this case. The order also expresses the view that the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, giving higher standing to federal laws that contradict state laws on the same subject, will not allow any state court to remove the party.

The order also grants the national Democratic Party the ability to intervene in the case, so that if the National Democratic Party wants to appeal to the Fourth Circuit, even though the Board doesn’t, the Democratic Party can do that.

The order examines the evidence concerning disputed signatures, and determines that the number of disputed signatures, when subtracted from the number of signatures submitted, does not change the State Board’s decision that there are enough valid signatures.

Here is an Alaska sample ballot for the August 16, 2022 event. The top half of the ballot is the top-four primary, which does not use ranked choice voting. But the bottom half is the special general election for U.S. House, and it does use ranked choice voting.

On August 2, the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion in Hero v Lake County Election Board, 21-2793. The issue was whether election officials had the right to exclude a Republican candidate for local office from the primary ballot, which they did because the party objected to his past support for independent candidates. The opinion says the plaintiff was always free to run as an independent candidate.

This outcome is surprising. The Seventh Circuit had never before issued any opinion giving political parties this much power. The Ninth Circuit has rejected similar lawsuits in the past. The Eleventh Circuit had upheld the right of the Republican Parties of Florida and Georgia to exclude David Duke from its presidential primaries, and the Eighth Circuit had upheld the right of the Republican Party to exclude Rocky De La Fuente from its 2020 presidential primary, but there are no similar circuit decisions that relate to primaries other than presidential primaries.

Here is a news story.