On April 3, the Maryland House unanimously passed HB 529. It lowers the number of signatures for statewide independent candidates from 1% of the number of registered voters (over 40,000) to exactly 10,000. The bill now goes to the Governor.
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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 April 3, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Gardner v Rideout, 16-828. The lower courts had struck down New Hampshire’s law, making it illegal for a voter to photograph his or her own voted ballot. The state asked for U.S. Supreme Court review, but failed to get it.
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.
The Centrist Project is meeting in Chicago, April 1-2. See this story. The group hopes to back independent candidates for U.S. Senate in 2018 in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. They have been joined by Joel Searby, who was Evan McMullin’s campaign manager in the presidential election of 2016.