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.
On May 15, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed SB 323. It roughly doubles all the candidate filing fees. This means the filing fee for independent presidential candidates, and the presidential nominees of unqualified parties, will be $35,000 in 2020, unless the fee is struck down.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lubin v Panish and also Bullock v Carter that filing fees are unconstitutional unless they are needed to keep ballots from being too crowded. Because the new filing fee for Governor will be $2,000, it may be difficult for the state to explain why it needs $35,000 for President.
Arizona is one of a handful of states that requires more signatures for an independent presidential candidate, than for an entire newly-qualifying party. The only other such states are Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. In 2016, Arizona required 35,514 signatures for an independent presidential candidate, but 20,119 for a entire new party.
Last year, Rocky De La Fuente, an independent presidential candidates, sued Arizona, arguing that there can’t be any state interest in requiring more signatures for a single candidate than for a new party, because a new party might cause hundreds of names to be added to a general election ballot, whereas obviously an independent candidate petition only adds one name. The lawsuit, De La Fuente v Reagan, 2:16cv-2419, got a very slow start, but it is finally underway. Discovery must be completed by August 11, 2017.
De La Fuente had filed a similar lawsuit against Oklahoma, which formerly had the same characteristic, but that case was mooted when the 2017 legislature eased the independent presidential petition procedure so that it is less difficult than the new party petition requirement.
On May 15, the U.S. Supreme Court revealed that at its May 11 conference, it had refused to hear all four election law cases that were before it.
It refused to hear Libertarian Party of Kentucky v Grimes, 16-1034, thus continuing its 26-year record of refusing all cert petitions from minor parties and independent candidates that concern election law (unless the major parties were also in the same case). The issue was the state’s restrictive definition of “political party”, one which requires certain support in a presidential race.
It refused to hear North Carolina v North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 16-833, over the election laws that affect voting and were passed in 2013, when Republicans won complete control of state government. The 2013 laws curtailed the ability of voters to vote early, eliminated the ability to register to vote the day before the election, curtailed the ability to cast a provisional ballot out of the precinct of residence, and imposed a government photo-ID requirement for voters at the polls. The U.S. District Court had upheld all those laws, but the Fourth Circuit had invalidated all of them. The basis for the Fourth Circuit decision is that all these laws had a racially discriminatory intent.
It refused to hear the Montana Republican and Hawaii Democratic cases against open primaries. They were Democratic Party of Hawaii v Nago, 16-652, and Ravalli County Republican Committee v Stapleton, 16-806.
Next week the U.S. Supreme Court may reveal whether it will hear Republican Party of Louisiana v Federal Election Commission, 16-865, over federal campaign finance laws that inhibit contributions to state and local parties. Soon it will also act on Gill v Whitford, 16-1161, over Wisconsin’s partisan legislative gerrymander.
