On April 5, Lincoln Chafee withdrew as a candidate for the Libertarian Party nomination. See this story. Thanks to Eric Garris for the link.
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Wisconsin is holding its judicial non-partisan elections on April 7, along with Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. On April 4 the Republican National Committee asked the U.S. Supreme Court to disallow a ruling of the lower federal courts, permitting absentee mail ballots to count if they arrive in election administration offices by April 13. The Republican National Committee wants all such ballots to be invalidated unless they have a postmark of April 7 or earlier. Here is the filing. Republican National Committee v Democratic National Committee, 19A1016.
UPDATE: the Democratic response is here.
UPDATE: here is the Republican reply brief.
On March 30, an Ohio group in support of an initiative to raise the minimum wage sued in state court to ask for a reduction in the number of signatures for 2020 only. The group had collected 73,968 signatures by March 12. Ohioans for Raising the Wage v LaRose, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, 20-cv-2381. The lawsuit also seeks to suspend the requirement that the petition have a significant number of signatures in at least 44 counties. The statewide requirement is 452,958, and the group asks that it be lowered to 265,774. Thanks to Pat Quinn for this news.
On March 31, an independent candidate for U.S. House in Oklahoma, Stephen Christopher Wright, filed a federal lawsuit against the Oklahoma petition in lieu of filing fee. He argues that it is impossible to collect the needed signatures. Although Oklahoma would let him on the ballot without a petition if he paid the filing fee, he argues that he cannot afford the fee. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice that candidates who cannot pay the filing fee must have some alternative means for getting on the ballot.
Here is the Complaint in Wright v State, w.d., 5:20cv-287. He has already been permitted to file the lawsuit without paying the court filing fee; the magistrate agrees that he is a pauper.
His Complaint is legally deficient because he only sued the “State of Oklahoma”. Under the Eleventh Amendment, a lawsuit like this must sue individual state officers, not the state itself. But it will be easy at this point for him to amend his Complaint to also sue the Secretary of the State Election Board, or perhaps the members of the State Board, or perhaps the Governor. Any one of those defendants would be sufficient. Thanks to Chris Powell for news about this lawsuit.
On April 3, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said it is possible, but not likely, that he will run for president as an independent in 2020. See this story.