On April 14, all sides in Greene v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:22cv-1294, submitted answers to some questions the U.S. District Court Judge had asked of both sides.
Here is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s response.
Here is the response of the Secretary of State.
Also, here is the response of the voters who had brought the challenge to Congresswoman Greene.
On April 15, the Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in Schmett v State Objections Panel, 22-0618. It says that Abby Finkenauer should be on the June 2022 Democratic primary ballot as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Here is the opinion, which involves interpretation of the statute. A lower state court had kept her off the ballot because she was three signatures short in one county, because the signer (who was a registered voter) didn’t add the date next to his or her signature.
Finkenauer is a former member of the U.S. House, and is considered the leading candidate for U.S. Senate in this year’s Democratic primary.
On April 15, an amicus curiae brief was filed in Alabama Libertarian Party v Merrill, 21-1288, in the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the case over the Alabama law that provides that the list of registered voters should be given free to the qualified parties, but unqualified parties that are petitioning must pay $37,000.
Here is the amicus, which was filed by the Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE) and Citizens in Charge. The brief discusses the Copenhagen Meeting Document, which was created in 1990 and which the United States signed. We, and the other nations who signed, promised to “respect the right of individuals and groups to establish, in full freedom, their own political parties or other political organizations and provide such political parties and organizations with the necessary legal guarantees to enable them to compete with each other on a basis of equal treatment before the law.”
Finally, a general news story has mentioned the April 8 decision of a U.S. District Court in Iowa that struck down the March petition deadline for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties. Bleeding Heartland has the story.
On April 13, an Arkansas state trial court put Sandra Young Harris back on the May 24 primary ballot. She is running for a judicial office. The Secretary of State had removed her after noticing that a campaign finance form she filled out had the wrong subdistrict number. See this story. The judge found that there is a fundamental right to be a candidate in the Arkansas Constitution, and that restrictions are to be liberally interpreted.
Election officials will now need to re-program vote-counting machines.
