On June 22, a North Carolina Administrative Law Judge ruled that Al Pisano, Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate in 2020, should not be required to pay a fine of $2,750 for having been late with his campaign finance reports. Here is the Opinion. It says that the North Carolina Board of Elections failed to follow its own procedures. The procedures say that the Board should have notified Pisano immediately when they didn’t receive his report. Instead they did not communicate with him until a year later, when they sent him a bill for $2,750.

The Administrative Law Judge also found that when Pisano asked for a waiver, the Board did not even address most of his points, and the letter denying waiver was unsigned and didn’t even appear to address the type of fine that had been levied. Thanks to Kevin Hayes for the link.

On June 20, the New York Libertarian and Green Parties asked the Second Circuit for an injunction, putting their candidates on the November 2022 ballot. The case was already open but had been moving slowly. It is Libertarian Party of New York v New York, 21-1464. Here is the here.

On June 21, the State Board of Elections filed a brief in opposition. See it brief.

On June 22, U.S. District Court Judge Tom Barber, a Trump appointee, refused to enjoin the Florida law that does not permit a party to run any candidates who have not been registered members for a full year, even if the party is a new party which couldn’t possibly have any eligible members.

Here is the order in People’s Party of Florida v Florida Department of State, m.d., 8:22cv-1274. The People’s Party wanted to nominate a candidate for Pasco County Commission this year, but she couldn’t qualify because she has not been a member of the People’s Party for a full year. But it was impossible for her to register into the party a year ago, because it wasn’t on the ballot until September 2021, and Florida does not allow anyone to register into a party that isn’t ballot-qualified.

The order fails to mention all the other lower court decisions on this subject, all of which agree that states cannot impose this type of law on new parties. Such cases were won in the past in federal court in Oklahoma, and in the State Supreme Courts of New Mexico and Nevada. As to the U.S. Supreme Court decision Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut, which says that states cannot bar parties from nominating non-members, Judge Barber said that case doesn’t control this case. He didn’t say why. Instead he depended on Storer v Brown, which upheld a California law that wouldn’t let independent candidates qualify if they had been members of a qualified party during the proceding year. That issue is separate from the issue of party autonomy to nominate whom they wish.

The order says the party should have filed the case sooner, although there would obviously be no election-administration problem if relief had been granted. Putting one more candidate on the ballot, over four months before the general election, does not disrupt election procedures. In the past the U.S. Supreme Court has added candidates to the general election ballot as late as August (John B. Anderson in Ohio), September (George Wallace in Ohio and Eugene McCarthy in Texas), and even in October (the 1968 nominees of the Alabama National Democratic Party, and the nominees of the Harold Washington Party in Illinois in 1990, and the nominees of the Socialist Workers and Socialist Labor in New York in 1970).

The order says the plaintiff-candidate is free to be a write-in candidate, but that is not true; the filing deadline for declared write-in candidates in Florida has already passed.