On July 2, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the Arkansas ballot access lawsuit Whitfield v Thurston, 20-2309, is moot. This is the case filed by independent U.S. Senate candidate Dan Whitfield in 2020. He needed 10,000 signatures and was unable to get them because of the covid health crisis. He also challenged the May 1 deadline. The U.S. District Court had upheld the law and had refused any relief.

The Eighth Circuit says the case is moot. Here is the 5-page opinion. It says that if Whitfield had alleged he wanted to be an independent candidate in a future election, it would not have been moot.

In the past ballot access constitutional cases have never been held moot just because the election was over, whether the candidate expected to run in a future election or not. The opinion acknowledges this, but says the U.S. Supreme Court has changed that old understanding, and says the plaintiff must show a personal future impact. However, none of the U.S. Supreme Court precedents cited by today’s Eighth Circuit are ballot access cases; instead they are campaign finance cases.

The new mootness rule discriminates against independent candidates, relative to minor parties. Minor parties are always assumed to be interested in the next election, but independent candidates are not. Thanks to Derek Muller for the link.

Free and Equal, Open the Debates, and the Brock Pierce Foundation are jointly sponsoring a two-day meeting in Cambria, San Luis Obispo County, California, July 3-4. Activists and musicians who support equality for non-major party candidates will be featured. The event can be watched remotely. See this link.

Brock Pierce was an independent presidential candidate in 2020.

On July 1, Open Primaries, an organization dedicated to eliminating the ability of political parties to have nominees, sent out a mass e-mail that publicizes its research on voter registration. The organization’s Report is called “The Next Great Migration, the Rise of Independent Voters.” The e-mail says, “The Open Primaries Education Fund released a fascinating and important report recently on the rise of independent voters in America.”

Their report was first released on November 29, 2020, and has not been updated. The Report is written to suggest that independent voters are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. electorate. All of the registration data in the report is from May 2020 or earlier months. But between March 2020 and March 2021, the percentage of voters registered as independents has declined slightly, from 29.09% to 28.39%. See the registration data in the printed issues of Ballot Access News for Marcy 1, 2020, and March 1, 2021. Links to past print issues can be seen on this website. Links to past print issues are on the upper right side.

The Report does not even acknowledge that 2.6% of voters are registered in parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties. The only mention of minor party data is in the Appendix. The Report says that Nebraska, California and Washington have nonpartisan primaries. Regarding Nebraska, this is highly misleading. Nebraska has nonpartisan elections for state legislature, but it has closed or semi-closed primaries for congress, partisan county office, and state executive office. The Report purports to list all the states with partisan registration, but it omits Arkansas. The Report appendix says its South Dakota data is from December 2020, but it actually shows the May 2020 South Dakota data. The Report’s map of the 50 states shows Washington as a state with partisan registration, but Washington does not have partisan registration.