On the afternoon of April 25, the Alliance Party nominated Rocky De La Fuente for president, and Darcy Richardson for vice-president. The convention was remote, and participants used Zoom. The delegates were asked to vote “yes” or “no” on the ticket. The vote was 24-2.
The party is ballot-qualified in South Carolina and Delaware, and it is fairly likely that it will also be ballot-qualified for president in Connecticut soon.
The Texas State Court of Appeals will hear oral argument on June 23 in Dikeman v Hughs, 14-19-00969-CV. This is the case in which the Libertarian Party challenges the 2019 law that says candidates seeking the nomination of a party that nominates by convention must pay a filing fee early in the year, before they even know if the convention will nominate them or not. Thanks to Jim Riley for this news.
On April 22, proponents of two Arizona statewide initiatives asked the Ninth Circuit for emergency injunctive relief, in their lawsuit to allow electronic signatures. Arizona already permits electronic signatures for non-presidential candidates, yet the U.S. District Court had denied any relief on April 17. The state’s response is due April 29, and the reply brief is due May 1. Arizonans for Fair Elections v Hobbs, 20-15719.
On March 18, the Oklahoma Secretary of State waived the requirement that statewide initiatives must be gathered in a 90-day period. See the order here.
Although much focus during the health crisis has been on the difficulty of petitioning, a related issue is that if a petition is submitted, it is now more difficult for election officials to check the validity of the signatures. See this story, over a San Jose, California city initiative. The signatures were submitted to the city clerk. The city clerk counted the sheets, gave the proponents a receipt for the number of pages, and turned the petition over to the county registrar of voters.
But, in the process, several hundred sheets never reached the registrar, and were hopelessly lost. The county registrar did a random sample of the petition and determined that it just barely didn’t qualify. Then the proponents learned, and proved, that some of the sheets had been lost. Now every signature on the petition must be checked. There are almost 100,000 raw signatures. The county is suing the city to recover at least part of the cost of checking the signatures. The story reveals that it will cost approximately $1,000,000 to check the petition.
