CommonWealth Magazine has this hard-hitting criticism of Massachusetts ballot access laws and also severe criticism of Secretary of State William Galvin. CommonWealth Magazine is the voice of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth. The article is by Evan Falchuk, founder of the United Independent Party.
On August 15, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted ruled that the Libertarian Party independent petition can be used to put Gary Johnson and Bill Weld on the November ballot, even though the petition used stand-ins. See this story.
On August 15, U.S. District Court Judge Karen Schreier declined to put the South Dakota Constitution Party nominees for U.S. Senate and state house on the November ballot. Libertarian Party of South Dakota v Krebs, 4:15cv-4111. The five-page decision says that the amended complaint in the case only sought relief for presidential candidates, so the court can’t go beyond the scope of the presidential election.
The reason the amended complaint only sought relief for presidential candidates is that when that amended complaint was filed, the state law appeared to block minor parties from being on the ballot for president unless they submitted a petition for party status by March 29. After the amended complaint was filed, the state re-interpreted its law and said that the actual deadline for a party petition was in July of election years, if they only wanted to be on for president and the various state partisan offices for which no party nominates by primary.
If the plaintiffs, the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party, had known the state was going to re-interpret its law in a permissive direction after the amended complaint was filed, then the amended complaint would have been worded differently. The case is still alive and a decision on declaratory relief will be issued in the future.
The Boston Globe of August 15 has this letter to the editor, written by Evan Falchuk, founder of the United Independent Party. The letter criticizes long-time Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin for his hostility to minor parties. The letter does not mention Galvin’s actions in 2008, when his office first told the Libertarian Party that it could use stand-ins for president and vice-president, but later reversed itself and denied substitution, even though it had been permitted numerous times in the past.
This lengthy article in the Charlotte Observer explains the historical background for why North Carolina requires so many signatures for minor parties to get on the ballot. That is in the very end of the article. The law was passed in 1983 in reaction to the Socialist Workers Party having qualified in North Carolina in 1980, when the requirement was exactly 10,000 signatures. That was the first time a Marxist political party had ever qualified for the North Carolina ballot, and the legislature was not pleased. Thanks to Douglas Joy for the link.
