The North Dakota Libertarian Party went off the ballot in November 2018 for failing to poll 5% for either Secretary of State or Attorney General. In order to get back on, it needs 7,000 valid signatures. The party is circulating that petition and is approximately half-finished.
The Mississippi Constitution says all elections for statewide state office require the winner to win a majority of the popular vote, and also to carry a majority of state house districts. If no candidate does that, then the state legislature chooses the office-holder.
On May 30, several African-American voters filed a federal lawsuit against that system. McLemore v Hosemann, s.d., 3:19cv-383. The state has filed a motion to dismiss, which is pending. Thanks to Election Law Blog for this news.
This Texas Tribune article details the growing movement in Texas to end partisan election of judges.
Minor parties in Texas frequently retain their qualified status by polling enough votes for one of the statewide partisan judicial races. There are always several such races on the ballot, every two years, and typically Democrats don’t fill their entire statewide judicial ticket, making it easy for a minor party to meet the vote test.
Some proponents of a local city charter initiative in Tacoma, Washington, have filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, on whether the First Amendment protects initiatives from being removed from the ballot before the voters can vote. Of course, this only refers to initiatives that have enough valid signatures. Save Tacoma Water v Port of Tacoma, 18-1518. The Washington state courts had removed the initiative from the ballot on the grounds that, if passed, the initiative would have been unconstitutional.
The initiative concerned whether the city should be required to hold a popular vote before issuing permits for new industries to use an exceptionally large amount of water from the city water system. Here is the cert petition. The cert petition says there is a Circuit split on the issue. The cert petition says that it would be unthinkable for a court to tell a legislative body that it couldn’t vote on a proposed bill, just because the bill might later be held unconstitutional. By analogy, then, the petition says initiatives should be entitled to the same treatment.
Former Justice John Paul Stevens died July 16 at the age of 99. While he was on the U.S. Supreme Court, he was a strong defender of voting rights for people who wish to vote for candidates other than Democratic and Republican candidates. He was especially eager to preserve the ability of independent candidates, and new parties, to get on the ballot even if they didn’t enter the race early in the election year.
He was President Gerald Ford’s only appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1977, in Mandel v Bradley, a case over the March petition deadline in Maryland, he wrote separately to say that no previous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld early petition deadlines. He specifically said that Jenness v Fortson, the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Georgia’s 5% petition requirement, did not stand for the idea that a June petition deadline was constitutional. Georgia had a June petition deadline when Jenness v Fortson was decided, but Stevens pointed out that the Socialist Workers Party, which brought Jenness v Fortson, had not complained about the June deadline, and therefore the deadline issue was not settled in that case.
In 1983 Stevens wrote Anderson v Celebrezze, which struck down the Ohio independent presidential petition deadline of March 20. This case had been brought by Congressman John B. Anderson, who became an independent presidential candidate on April 24, 1980, after having lost 20 Republican presidential primaries. Anderson sued all five states in which he had missed the petition deadline, and won all five lawsuits, and the Ohio case was then reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was tough for Anderson to win this case, because a previous U.S. Supreme Court precedent on early deadlines, Mandel v Bradley, had said early petition deadlines were only unconstitutional if the number of signatures was high. Ohio in 1980, and currently, only required 5,000 signatures for an independent presidential candidate. Five other presidential candidates in 1980 had complied with the Ohio petition. At the time, 5,000 signatures was only one-tenth of 1% of the number of registered voters in Ohio. But, Stevens skillfully wrote an opinion which established that early petition deadlines are unconstitutional all by themselves, regardless of the number of signatures. Anderson v Celebrezze has been responsible for lower court ballot access victories on over half the states. Many are pending currently.
Stevens and Justice Byron White did not like each other. White wrote all of the unfavorable ballot access decisions from 1972 through 1992. Stevens and White were always on the opposite side in these cases. White voted to keep even the strongest independent presidential candidates off ballots, including George Wallace in 1968, Eugene McCarthy in 1976, and John Anderson in 1980. Thanks to Political Wire for the news about the death of Stevens.
