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.

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.

On April 24, the Colorado Secretary of State appealed Warren v Griswold to the State Supreme Court.  This is the case in which the state trial court had put a candidate for U.S. Senate on the Democratic primary ballot, even though she did not collect the required 10,500 signatures.