On August 28, Kanye West filed a ballot access case in state court in Wisconsin. See this story. Thanks to several people for the link.
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Although many of Kanye West’s ballot access petitions around the country have been rejected, only in Ohio has he brought a lawsuit to get back on the ballot. His lawsuit was filed in the Ohio Supreme Court on August 26. Here is the Complaint.
The Secretary of State had rejected the petition because the copy of the declaration of candidacy on each petition sheet differs slightly from the original. The declaration of candidacy on the petitions has the names of a committee on vacancies. Also the signature of the vice-presidential nominee, Michelle Tidball, doesn’t look the same on both documents.
An Ohio voter, Lewis Goldfarb, has asked to intervene in the case. He says there are other flaws in the West petition that the Secretary of State has not named. For example, he says that Kanye West does not actually reside at the address that he listed as his address. The Ohio Supreme Court has asked both sides whether they feel Goldbarb should be allowed to intervene.
On August 28, Maine’s Secretary of State said he will ask the State Supreme Court to reverse the decision of a lower state court that restored the referendum on ranked choice voting for president on the ballot. If the referendum remains on the ballot, then ranked-choice voting can’t be used for president this year.
On August 27, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the initiative to establish a top-four system should not appear on the ballot. The same decision also removed an initiative to set up a nonpartisan redistricting commission. Arkansas Voters First and Open Primaries Arkansas v Thurston, cv-20-454.
The initiative proponents were required to certify that they had checked the criminal record of all paid circulators and that they all were free of having a criminal record. Instead, they certified that they had checked the criminal records, but made a technical error and didn’t say what the results of the background checks were. This is a very abstruse reason to reject any petition. The vote was 6-1. Here is the decision.
The top-four system would have ended the ability of parties to have nominees for office other than president. One result would have been to make it more difficult for a qualified party to remain on the ballot. If the measure had been on the ballot and had passed, the only way a party could remain on the ballot would be polling 3% for president. This is a severe test. In the last 100 years, the only parties, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, which have polled at least 3% for president in the nation have been the Progressive Party of 1924, the American Party (also called American Independent Party) of 1968, the Reform Party of 1996, and the Libertarian Party in 2016.
The Texas Supreme Court wants a brief from the Libertarian Party by Tuesday, September 1, in the lawsuit over whether Libertarians for congress and state office who didn’t pay a filing fee should be removed from the ballot. Here is the brief of the Texas House Republican Caucus PAC, concerning Libertarians running for state office.