On March 31, Rocky De La Fuente filed an amended complaint in his Georgia ballot access lawsuit, to cure certain problems with his original complaint. De La Fuente v Kemp, n.d., 1:16cv-2937. The case challenges the July 1 deadline for independent presidential candidates to submit their presidential elector candidates, and also Georgia’s failure to have any uniform standards for checking the validity of signatures from one county to the next.

The original complaint had made an assertion that deadlines for independent presidential candidates can’t be earlier than the dates of major party presidential conventions. On March 17, the U.S. District Court had rejected that assertion, but had suggested that an amended complaint might reasonably argue that the state has no interest in the July 1 deadline for electors, given that the petition itself isn’t due until two weeks later. De La Fuente did submit his electors by that date, so he has standing to challenge the separate earlier July 1 deadline for the list of electors.

De La Fuente has constitutional ballot access challenges pending in Alabama (sore loser issue), Arizona (number of signatures), California (number of signatures), Georgia, Oklahoma (number of signatures), Pennsylvania (sore loser), Texas (many issues), Virginia (mandatory disclosure of entire social security number for presidential elector candidates), and Washington (the need to publish notice in a newspaper before starting to petition for President).

On March 31, the Arizona Libertarian Party filed this brief in U.S. District Court in its ballot access case, Libertarian Party of Arizona v Reagan, 2:16cv-1019. The issue is how difficult a state may make it for members of a small qualified party to get on their own party’s primary ballot.

In 2015 the Arizona legislature made it vastly more difficult for Libertarians to get on their own primary ballot, and also to win write-in nominations in their own primary. As a result, no Libertarians appeared on the Arizona November ballot for federal or state office in 2016 (except for President), for the first time since 1990.

The state filed a brief on March 31 as well, and when that brief is available, a link will be created in this blog post to that as well.

Steve Silberstein, a supporter of the National Popular Vote plan, has this comprehensive article about the plan in Washington Monthly. Although the arguments for and against the plan tend to be repeated, this article is especially useful because of the extensive data about how battleground states get more federal government support than other states. Also the article has useful data about the overwhelming extent to which national major party presidential campaigns focus only on the battleground states. And it rebuts the idea that the current system was the choice of the founding fathers, by pointing out that in the first presidential election, 1789, only three states used the system we use today.

The article does not mention which states those were, but they were Maryland, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Thanks to Michael Ochs for the link.