Law Professor Derek T. Muller has this op-ed in the New York Times, explaining all the policy reasons why states should not use ballot access restrictions to force presidential candidates to reveal their income tax returns.
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On March 31, the Eleventh Circuit denied Georgia’s request for a rehearing in Green Party of Georgia v Kemp, 16-15880. This is the case filed in 2012 by the Green Party and the Constitution Party, against the requirement that their presidential candidates submit approximately 50,000 valid signatures to be on the ballot for president. The parties won the case in U.S. District Court in 2016, and won again in the Eleventh Circuit earlier this year.
The Georgia legislature now really has no reason not to examine the various ballot access bills that were introduced earlier this year. This case is one of the most significant ballot access victories in the last few years.
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.
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.