The Eleventh Circuit is expediting the case Hand v Scott. The oral argument will be in late July. This is the case over whether the Constitution demands that Florida must have objective standards concerning how ex-felons apply to regain voting rights. Although last week the Eleventh Circuit had stayed the order that the state come up immediately with objective standards, the Eleventh Circuit has not yet decided the big issue in the case.
On May 2, the Tenth Circuit refused to disturb the May 1 order of the U.S. District Court that had put Congressman Doug Lamborn back on the Colorado Republican primary ballot. The three judges were Jerome Holmes and Terrence O’Brien (Bush appointees), and Allison Eid (a Trump appointee). Goodall v Williams.
Lamborn’s opponents also tried to persuade the Colorado Supreme Court to remove him, but that court also declined to do so.
Tennessee requires 33,844 signatures to get a new party on the ballot, but only 25 signatures for any independent candidate to get on the ballot (except president is 275). The party petition is so difficult, it has existed since 1961 and has never been used, except in 1968 by the American Party. In order to illustrate how absurd it is for the state to require so many more signatures for a party than for an independent candidate, the Tennessee Libertarian Party has put 17 gubernatorial candidates on the November 2018 ballot. The Volunteer Times has a story about this. The Volunteer Times is a newspaper in Campbell County, Tennessee.
The story says 30 independent candidates will be listed on the November ballot for Governor.
Ballot Access News
April 1, 2018 – Volume 33, Number 11
| This issue was printed on cream-colored paper. |
Table of Contents
On May 1, U.S. District Court Judge Philip Brimmer issued a 25-page order in Goodall v Williams, 1:18cv-980. The order enjoins the Secretary of State of Colorado from enforcing the state’s ban on out-of-state circulators for candidate petitions. It also puts Congressman Doug Lamborn, a Republican who is running for re-election, back on the Republican primary ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court had removed him last week because it had found that he used petitioners who were not Colorado residents. But the Colorado Supreme Court had said nothing about the constitutionality of the ban on out-of-state petitioners.
As to the state’s argument that the political parties that have primaries have a freedom of association right to limit their primary ballots to candidates who comply with the law, the order says, “The existence of competing interests does not give state legislatures license to infringe on the constitutional rights of other participants in the electoral process.”
The order notes on page 18 that there is a growing consensus from courts around the nation that bans on out-of-state circulators are unconstitutional.
