On January 16, the five presidential elector candidates for Shiva Ayyadurai in Nebraska filed this request to the U.S. Supreme Court for more time to file their proposed cert petition. Their petition in 2024 for independent presidential candidate Ayyadurai had enough valid signatures, but the Secretary of State refused to put him on the ballot as an independent because he was born in India. The Eighth Circuit last year agreed with the U.S. District Court, which had ruled in favor of the Secretary of State.

The electors want to try to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court that they should have been allowed to run. Ayyadurai himself is not on the case. Lauters v Evnen, 25A834.

The only time the U.S. Supreme Court ever accepted a ballot access case in which only presidential elector candidates were plaintiffs was 1969, in Moore v Ogilvie. This was an Illinois case. The electors had to claim they were unpledged. They really wanted to support U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy as an independent presidential candidate, but they couldn’t because McCarthy didn’t want to run and therefore had nothing to do with the lawsuit.

On January 20, the Virginia Senate Elections & Privileges Committee defeated SB 76 by 6-9. It would have moved the non-presidential primary in presidential years from June to March. That would have automatically moved the deadline for non-presidential minor party and independent candidate petitions from June to March as well. The bill’s sponsor was Senator Schuyler Van Valkenburg (D-Henrico).

According to this article, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said recently that if a bill to convert the state’s open primaries to closed primaries reaches him, he would probably veto it. See this story.