American Bridge and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee recently declared publicly that they will do everything they can to injure Howard Schultz if he runs for president in 2020 as an independent. See this story.

Also, on January 28, Andrew Tanenbaum, who founded the web page electoral-vote.com, wrote “Democrats are not powerless to stop Schultz if they really want to. They have a trifecta in 14 states, including Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. That means they can pass any laws they want to. For example, they could pass a law requiring independent candidates or new parties to get the signatures of 20% of the registered voters in every one of the state’s counties in order to qualify for ballot access. In practice, no one could ever do that, but states have broad authority to determine the rules for elections, so that might well stand up in court. Faced with such a barrier, Schultz, who is not well known, might decide to forget the whole thing.”

A bill in Nevada has been introduced that would move the petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties from June to May, and move the petition deadline for non-presidential independent candidates from June to March. It is AB 82, requested by the Nevada Association of Counties and sponsored by the Assembly Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections.

In 1992, a U.S. District Court enjoined the June petition deadlines that were in effect that year, in Fulani v Lau, cv-N-92-535. The legislature then moved them to July, but some years later, moved them back to June.

Nevada also lost a deadline case in 1986, Libertarian Party of Nevada v Swackhamer, 638 F Supp 565, although the deadline struck down in that case was in April. Thanks to Jeanine Hansen for the news about AB 82.

New Jersey State Senator Dawn Addiego has changed her registration from Republican to Democratic. She represents part of Burlington County. She has been in the State Senate since 2010, and was last re-elected in 2017. She is not up until 2021. She is the third state legislator this month to make this switch. The others were in Maine and California. Thanks to Political Wire for this news.