On September 14, U.S. District Court John Jones issued a ruling in De La Fuente v Cortes, m.d., 1:16cv-1696. The issue is whether Rocky De La Fuente can be on the Pennsylvania ballot as an independent candidate for President. The order says the issue belongs in state court.
So, on September 16, De La Fuente filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court, a state court. That case is also called De La Fuente v Cortes. Here is the complaint in state court.
On the evening of September 18, Sixty Minutes interviewed Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Here is the transcript. Thanks to Ken Bush for the link.
On September 13, one faction of the Independent Party of Connecticut sued the Connecticut Secretary of State over the party’s ballot position for U.S. Senate. One faction of the party, the one that filed the lawsuit, nominated John R. Price. The other faction nominated the Republican nominee, Dan Carter. The Secretary of State said she will not print either one on the ballot. The lawsuit had a hearing on Friday, September 16, in Hartford Superior Court. So far there is no opinion. See this story.
South Carolina permits two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate. Voters can choose which party line to support. The Green Party has nominated four individuals for Congress who are also Democratic nominees. They are Thomas Dixon for U.S. Senate; Dimitri Cherny for U.S. House district one; Arik Bjorn for U.S. House district two; and Mal Hyman for U.S. House district seven.
The Green Party has its own member running for U.S. House in district six. He is Prince Charles Mallory.
A Georgia state court will hear De La Fuente v Kemp, Fulton County Superior Court 2016-cv-279793, on Monday, September 26. The issue is the validity of De La Fuente’s independent presidential petition. He submitted 14,500 signatures, and 7,500 were needed. The state said only 2,964 of his signatures are valid.
De La Fuente says that the various Georgia counties used inconsistent methods to validate signatures. He says Fulton County, which contains Atlanta and where the bulk of his signatures were gathered, refused to validate signatures of voters who are on the inactive list. Georgia law is clear that voters on the inactive list may sign. De La Fuente also says that when the signature was difficult to read, but the signer’s address and date of birth were clear, the county refused to use the address and date of birth information to find the signature. Because the list of registered voters is computerized, this would have been easy for the county to do.
The Secretary of State says the petition validity doesn’t matter, because De La Fuente missed the July 1 deadline for submitting his presidential elector candidates. A federal court had last month refused to set aside that Georgia law, but the federal judge was influenced by the fact that the state had told him De La Fuente didn’t have enough valid signatures anyway. That case is now in the Eleventh Circuit, 16-15880. Obviously if De La Fuente can show that he does have enough valid signatures, the federal court would then take his deadline challenge seriously.
