On March 12, SB209 and SB210 were signed into law by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

SB210 mandates that a circulator read the summary of the initiative to any potential signer. Sometimes the summary is long and detailed and can require as much as five minutes to be read aloud. If the circulator doesn’t obey this law, it will be considered a criminal act.

SB209 says that if a petitioner is found to have committed any crimes, none of the signatures he or she obtained are valid.

There are other bills that were recently passed in Arkansas that greatly injure the initiative process. The sponsor of all these bills was Senator Kim Hammer (R-Benton).

BAN has learned that there is likely to be upcoming litigation challenging the constitutionality of these and the other Arkansas anti-initiative laws that were covered in the April 1 edition of Ballot Access News.

Nevada Assembly Bill 534 has a hearing on April 10 in the Assembly Legislative Operations and Elections Committee. It would require independent candidates (for office other than president) to file a declaration of candidacy in February. It is part of an omnibus election law bill sponsored by the committee.

Such laws have been declared unconstitutional in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina. The precedents are based on Anderson v Celebrezze, which said that states must give independents a chance to get on the ballot after the major parties must identified their candidates. The South Carolina decision, Cromer v State of South Carolina, 917 F 2d 819 (1990), was a US Court of Appeals decision. The other two are U.S. District Court decisions: Kentucky’s is Sweeney v Crigler, 457 F Supp 3d 577 (2019); and West Virginia is Daly v Tennant, 216 F Supp 3d 199 (2016).
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On April 7, U.S. District Court Judge Lashann DeArcy Hall, an Obama appointee, refused to enjoin the 2022 New York law that bans “independent” or “Independence” as words that can be part of the name of a party. The judge also assumed that therefore an independent candidate can’t use those labels because if the independent candidate were running for Governor or President and got 2% of the vote, that would create a ballot-qualified party and then that party would have an illegal name.

The judge said the ban is “not severe” because the candidate can campaign as an independent without having that label on the ballot. The decision does not even mention the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision Gralike v Cook, which struck down a Missouri law that put certain labels on the ballot for candidates that injured them. That case clearly established that the First Amendment free speech provision applies to ballot labels. Yet Judge Hall said the First Amendment doesn’t apply to ballot labels.

The plaintiff, Mayoral candidate Jim Walden, has already appealed to the Second Circuit. Walden v Kosinski, 25-764. The Second Circuit is expediting the case and all briefs will be in by April 15.