On August 6, the Mayor of Washington, D.C., signed bill B23-0864. For 2020 only, it lowers the presidential petition from 5,007 signatures to 250 signatures.

The petition deadline was August 5. As far as is known, the only presidential petitions submitted were for Gloria La Riva and Brock Pierce. The District has four ballot-qualified parties: Democratic, Republican, Green, and Libertarian.

D.C. had already lowered the other district wide petitions to 250 earlier this year, but the earlier change did not include presidential petitions. La Riva filed a federal lawsuit and the city chose to settle the matter with the new legislation.

August 3 was the Pennsylvania deadline for minor party and independent candidate petitions. Both the Green Party and the Libertarian Party submitted more than twice as many signatures as were required. The requirement was 5,000. Libertarians submitted slightly over 10,000, and Greens submitted approximately 15,000.

On August 4, the Trump for President committee and the Republican National Committee filed a federal lawsuit against the new Nevada law on postal balloting. Donald J. Trump for President v Cegavske, 2:20cv-1445. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Kent J. Dawson, a Clinton appointee.

The lawsuit does not attack everything in the new law, which was signed on August 3 and which takes effect immediately. It challenges the part of the new law that says postal ballots without a postmark are deemed to have been mailed by election day if the ballot arrives by the Friday after election day. The Complaint says that this will permit some postal voters to vote the day after the election, and that Congress has already established that election day is on Tuesday.

The lawsuit challenges the disparity in the number of vote centers in various counties. Voter centers are places where voters can vote, if they would rather not vote by mail, or if they want to hand their postal ballot directly to election officials. The lawsuit says the new rule on vote centers discriminates against certain rural counties.

The lawsuit challenges the new law’s provision that if a postal ballot envelope arrives at the office of the election officials with two voted ballots inside, the local election officials have discretion to decide if both ballots should be counted, or whether to invalidate both ballots. Presumably the legislature was anticipating that in many households with two voters, the two voters might decide to enclose both of their ballots inside the same envelope, and presumably both voters would sign the outside of the envelope. The lawsuit says that county discretion is too great, and therefore the standards are not equal across the state.

Finally, the lawsuit challenges the new law for giving county election officials too much discretion over how to tally ballots. Here is the Complaint.