As previously noted, on July 20, a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles refused to give injunctive relief to Joseph Kishore for California ballot access relief. Kishore is the Socialist Equality Party presidential nominee and he wanted to use California’s independent presidential petition, which requires 196,964 signatures to be collected mid-April through early August.

On July 23, Don Blankenship, Constitution Party nominee, who has a parallel case in San Francisco, filed this Supplemental document explaining why the Kishore decision is flawed and why the judge in the northern district should not follow it. The supplemental document lists seven favorable ballot access precedents that the judge in Los Angeles ignored in her opinion.

On July 17, the proponents of three Arkansas statewide initiatives asked the State Supreme Court to rule that the paperwork they submitted, concerning their petitioners, is not flawed, and that the Secretary of State should proceed to check the validity of their signatures. Miller v Thurston, cv-20-454.

The Secretary of State had rejected three initiatives, without even checking their petitions, because the Secretary of State said their certification about their circulators was flawed. The law says proponents must submit a criminal records report, saying their petitioners have not been convicted of certain crimes. The proponents submitted paperwork saying they had done the criminal background checks. But the Secretary of State said the paperwork should have affirmatively declared that the circulators had not been convicted, instead of just saying that their records had been checked.

This news story about minor party and independent candidate filing in Illinois reveals that Kanye West’s petition had 4,120 signatures. The requirement is 2,500.