On April 21, the proponents of two Arizona statewide initiatives filed an appeal in Arizonans for Fair Elections v Hobbs, the case over whether Arizona should permit initiative campaigns to gather electronic signatures. U.S. District Court Judge Dominic Lanza, a Trump appointee, had rejected their case.
Arizona permits electronic signatures for candidate petitions, but not independent presidential petitions and not petitions to qualify a party.
According to this story, New York Assemblywoman Rebecca Seawright, who was removed from the 2020 Democratic primary ballot over a paperwork error, will run as an independent this year if she can’t get back on the Democratic primary ballot. She will also bring a lawsuit.
Law Professor Jeffrey Abramson has this interesting article in Emory Law Journal, comparing presidential electors to jurors. He notes that jurors are asked to pledge that they will follow the judge’s instructions as to the relevant law. But if jurors return a verdict that contradicts the judge’s understanding of the law, we do not punish the jurors.
The article talks about a time long ago in England when jurors were punished by a lower court judge, but then a higher English court reversed their convictions.
The article could have been better if, when it talked about Ray v Blair, a 1952 U.S. Supreme Court opinion about presidential electors, it explained that the case involved a pledge before a candidate could get on the Alabama Democratic primary ballot. Back then the Alabama Democratic Party chose its presidential elector candidates in a primary. No state currently does that. The article probably will lead most readers to assume Alabama had a pledge for actual presidential electors, not just candidates for presidential elector from one particular party.
Also the article says that all 39 electoral votes received by Strom Thurmond in 1948 were from electors who violated their pledge. Actually Strom Thurmond won the popular vote in the states that produced those presidential electors. He got more popular votes than Harry Truman in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi. And in Alabama, Truman wasn’t even on the ballot, so obviously Thurmond won. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
For the period 1970 through 2018, over one-third of all Massachusetts U.S. House elections had only one candidate on the November ballot. During the same period, no other state had as many as 25% of its races with only one person on the ballot.
The reason Massachusetts has had so many uncontested races for that office is because it has the nation’s most severe petition requirement to get on a primary ballot. It requires 2,000 signatures. No other state has such a high requirement for U.S. House primary ballot access.
Also, Massachusetts has rather severe laws for independent candidates to get on the ballot. And the state has consistently made the requirements more difficult over the years. In 1952, the Prohibition Party ran almost a full slate of candidates for U.S. House. In 1953, in response, the law was amended to make it more difficult for convention parties to run for district office.
In 1973, the legislature eliminated provision for small ballot-qualified parties to nominate by convention, and provided that all qualified parties had to nominate by primary. This was a severe blow, because the petitions for candidates to get on primary ballots was difficult.
In the 1990’s decade, Massachusetts had three ballot-qualified minor parties at one time or another, the most it had had in any decade since the 1940’s. This came about because the voters had passed an initiative in 1990, easing the definition of a qualified party. In 1998 the legislature doubled the number of signatures needed for a small qualified party to place candidates on its primary ballot.
The West Virginia Libertarian Party recently nominated some 2020 candidates by virtual convention. See this story. The party is ballot-qualified and nominates by convention.
