The U.S. Supreme Court has now docketed Kopitke v Bell, no. 20-897. This is the case over North Carolina’s independent presidential petition deadline of March 3. The Fourth Circuit upheld it last year, even though in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s March 20 independent presidential petition is too early. The Fourth Circuit said that the March deadline is constitutional because the North Carolina primary is in March. But the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts, have never said that the date of a state’s primary has anything to do with its independent presidential petition deadline. Here is the petition.

If it is true that the deadline for independent presidential candidates can be as early as that state’s presidential primary, then it would have been constitutional for New Hampshire in 2008 to have had an independent presidential deadline of January 8, because that was the date of the New Hampshire primary that year.

The New York Independence Party became a ballot-qualified party in November 1994, and was on the ballot continuously ever since, although under the new definition of a “qualified party” passed in 2020, it went off the ballot in November 2020.

In November 2020 it had its lowest voter support since becoming a qualified party. Its nominee for the top office on the ballot, Brock Pierce for president, only polled .26% of the vote. Except in 2008, the Independence Party has always nominated someone for president who was not a Democrat or a Republican, if it nominated anyone at all. In 1996 it nominated Ross Perot and got 7.97%. In 2000 it nominated John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party and got .36%. In 2004 it nominated Ralph Nader and got 1.14%. In 2008 it nominated Republican nominee John McCain and got 2.15%. In 2012 it had no presidential nominee. In 2016 it nominated Gary Johnson, who was also the Libertarian nominee, and got 1.55%.

In 2020, as in past years, almost all of the Independence Party’s nominees for Congress and state legislature were also Democratic or Republican nominees. In 2020, for U.S. House, the Independence Party only attracted 1.23% of the vote in the U.S. House races in which it had a nominee, the lowest ever. In the past it always ranged between 2.63% and 5.43% for U.S. House.

For State Senate in 2020, it polled 2.23% in the districts in which it was on the ballot, the lowest since 1994. For Assembly in 2020, it polled 2.42% in districts where it had a nominee, the lowest since 1994.

If the other minor parties who are suing New York state win their lawsuits against the new definition of “party”, then the Independence Party will be restored to the ballot also. The Independence Party recently became the New York state affiliate of the Alliance Party.