New Jersey holds a gubernatorial election on November 7, 2017. Independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, need 800 signatures by June 6. So far only one petition has been submitted: Vincent Ross, of Edison, whose ballot label will be “We the People.”
Here is the updated text of AB 469, a California bill that changes the petition in lieu of filing fees. The bill decreases the number of signatures needed in lieu of the filing fee. But it also shrinks the amount of time in which these signatures can be gathered.
For statewide office, the petition drops from 10,000 to 7,000 signatures. For U.S. House and State Senate, from 3,000 to 2,000. For Assembly, from 1,500 to 1,000. Peace & Freedom Party activism is responsible for the drop in the signatures.
The bill has passed the Assembly Elections Committee and will soon receive a vote on the Assembly floor.
On May 16, the Texas legislature passed SB 44 almost unanimously. It says that candidate petitions, whether independent candidates, or candidates seeking to be on a primary ballot, are deemed to have enough valid signatures unless they are challenged. And anyone who challenges must specify which signatures are being challenged; no one can file a “general” challenge.
Here is the text. It adds the sentence “Unless the petition is challenged, the authority is only required to review the petition for facial compliance with the applicable requirements as to form, content, and procedure.” Also, “A challenge must state with specificity how the application does not comply with the applicable requirements as to form, content, and procedure. The authority’s review of the challenge is limited to the specific items challenged and any response filed by the challenged candidate.”
The bill also restores the need for primary candidates for statewide judicial posts to submit a petition, to get on the primary ballot. Such petitions need 50 signatures from each of the 17 State Court of Appeals districts in the state. This primary judicial petition had been in effect in Texas primaries in the past, but it had been repealed for the 2016 election. The absence of the need for a primary petition is one reason the Democratic Party had a full slate of statewide judicial candidates in 2016, something the Democrats had not had in recent elections earlier than 2016. Thanks to Jim Riley for information about SB 44.
On May 13, the Illinois Green Party filed its reply brief in the Seventh Circuit in its ballot access case, Tripp v Smart, 16-3469. The issue is the 5% petition for legislative nominees of unqualified parties, as applied to rural districts without centers of population, combined with the requirement that each petition sheet be notarized. The U.S. District Court had upheld all challenged provisions.
On May 5, the plaintiff in Koller v Brown, n.d., 5:16cv-7069, filed this 29-page brief in their lawsuit to overturn the California law that tells presidential electors they must vote for the presidential candidate who carried their state.
