On November 26, Rocky De La Fuente sued Minnesota in federal court, over the law that gives the Republican Party exclusive control over which candidates may be listed on the party’s presidential primary ballot. De La Fuente v Simon, 0:19cv-2995. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge David Doty, a Reagan appointee. Here is the Complaint.

The case depends on the theory that the presidential primary ballot access law violates the U.S. Constitution, because it sets up a ballot access barrier that is not designed to help election administration. De La Fuente’s pending case in Georgia is similar.

Joe Mathews, a commentator on California politics, here writes that if California Democratic legislators and Governor Gavin Newsom really believe in the idea that candidates should be kept off ballots if they don’t reveal their income taxes, they ought to put a proposed state constitutional amendment on the ballot. If such an amendment passed the legislature and then the electorate also voted for it, then there would no longer be a state constitutional barrier to the law that the legislature passed this year, requiring presidential primary candidates to reveal their tax returns.

Of course, even if all that happened, there is still no guarantee that such a tax returns-ballot law would be constitutional under the U.S. Constitution.

The Arizona Daily Star, daily newspaper for Tucson, has this op-ed, criticizing Arizona ballot access requirements for minor parties. It focuses on the Green Party’s loss of qualified status. The op-ed does not say that the petition deadline for the party to get back on the ballot is in two days, and the party has not finished its petition, which requires approximately 37,000 signatures.

It is expected that the Green Party will sue the state over that extremely early petition deadline. The Green Party did have a lawsuit in 2014 over the deadline that existed that year, which was in February of the election year. That lawsuit failed because the attorney for the Green Party did not submit any evidence that the early deadline injured the party. He had assumed that he could win the case on precedents. The new lawsuit will not make that legal error.

The legislature moved the petition deadline from February of the election year, to November of the year before the election, early in 2019.