On August 14, a U.S. District Court struck down a New Hampshire law dealing with mailed absentee ballots. The law says if the signature on the outer envelope appears not to match the signatures on the voter registration record, the absentee ballot shall be rejected, with no notice to that voter. Here is the decision in Saucedo v Gardner, 1:17cv-183. This was an ACLU case. The decision is by Judge Landya McCafferty, an Obama appointee.
On August 14, the North Carolina State Elections Board filed this 15-page brief in Poindexter v Strach, e.d., 5:18cv-366. This is the case over whether three particular Constitution Party nominees should be on the November ballot. All three had run in Democratic or Republican primaries in May, and had lost. Then the Constitution Party nominated them at its state convention.
After they were nominated, the legislature passed a law, saying candidates who had run and lost in a partisan primary could not later be nominated by a new party that nominates by convention. The party then filed a federal lawsuit against that law. The state’s brief appears to be have been written before the August 13 decision of a state court, which said that another election law that had been passed after someone had qualified for the ballot (the ban on party labels for judicial candidates who had switched parties in the last three months) could not be enforced.
Various Montana newspapers and broadcast stations are starting to cover the Green Party lawsuit filed August 13 against the ballot access law for new parties. See this story.
On August 13, the New Mexico Supreme Court issued a one-sentence opinion in Miller v Padilla, S-1-SC-37171. It says the lower court opinion is affirmed. The case had been filed by independent candidate Carol Miller, who wanted to run for County Commission in Rio Arriba County as an independent. The New Mexico election law generally requires all non-presidential candidates to submit petitions, no matter whether they are running in a primary or in the general election. But a quirk in the law says members of major parties don’t need petitions to run in primaries for county office, yet everyone else does. Miller argued that the New Mexico State Constitution, which says elections shall be “free and equal”, meant that if members of major parties don’t need signatures, therefore no one should need them. But the lower court denied the case with no written opinion and now the State Supreme Court won’t write an opinion either.
Hawaii held primaries on Saturday, August 11. All ballot-qualified parties in Hawaii must use the primary to nominate candidates. Hawaii has five parties: Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution. The Constitution Party didn’t have any candidates this year. Greens are running a gubernatorial candidate for the first time since 2006.
Independent candidates did well in the primary. Hawaii forces non-presidential independent candidates to run in the open primary, and they must outpoll a partisan winner, or else poll 10% of the total primary vote for their office, or they can’t be on the November ballot. All three independents for U.S. Senate outpolled the Libertarian. Also, both independent candidates for Governor outpolled the Green gubernatorial nominee. However, the law says that when more than one independent for a single office meets the primary vote test, only the highest vote-getting independent can appear on the general election ballot.
Here is a link to the unofficial returns.
