The Kentucky petition deadline for independent presidential candidates, and the presidential nominees of unqualified parties, was September 4. According to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s website, only two petitions were submitted, for Brock Pierce and Kanye West. The requirement is 5,000. New stories say that West submitted 19,000 signatutes.
Kentucky qualified parties are Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
The Hawaii state elections office has posted the candidate list. It shows that the ballot-qualified American Shopping Party nominated Brock Pierce for president. See the list here.
On September 4, the Mississippi Secretary of State posted the candidate list. See it here. There will be nine presidential candidates on the ballot. Thanks to Thom Holmes for the link.
On September 4, Kanye West filed this brief in the Arizona Supreme Court in his ballot access case, West v Clayton.
On September 3, the Eleventh Circuit withdrew its original decision in Jacobson v Lee, 19-14552, and issued a new opinion. The first opinion, from April 29, upheld Florida’s law on ballot order because the plaintiff Democrats lacked standing. The new opinion says that ballot order lawsuits cannot even be entertained by federal courts, because they represent a “political question” that is outside the scope of litigation.
The vote is 2-1. Judges William Pryor, a Bush Jr. appointee; and Robert Luck, a Trump appointee, signed the opinion. Judge Jill Pryor, an Obama appointee, dissented. Her dissent is 82 pages, longer than the 70-page majority opinion.
It is ludicrous to say that federal courts cannot adjudicate laws on the order of candidates on the ballot. They have been doing so for fifty years. The majority says that because the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 held that partisan gerrymandering cases can’t be adjudicated in federal court, therefore ballot order can’t be either. But partisan gerrymandering cases are uniquely difficult because there is no obvious way to settle what is fair from what is not fair. By contrast, it is easy to design a fair ballot order system: either rotate the names of candidates from precinct to precinct, or hold a random method of choosing. One-third of the states use one of these methods. The dissent mentions these, and also suggests that putting candidates on the ballot by alphabetical order of their surname is fair. Not everyone agrees that that is fair.
Generally, when judges dissent, they say, at the bottom, “I respectfully dissent.” In this case, Judge Jill Pryor omitted the word “respectfully.”
