Candidates who intend to run in the South Carolina Republican Party presidential primary will be required to pay a filing fee of $40,000. There is no alternate method for getting on the ballot, even for candidates who say they don’t have the money.

Candidates file with the party, but, by law, the party gives $20,000 of that fee to the government to help pay for election administration. The party keeps the other $20,000 and the party need not pay any election administration costs for its primary.

The filing deadline for the Republican presidential primary is September 30, 2015. The party, not the government, chose that date. It is easily the earliest filing deadline for presidential primaries in any state. The next-earliest deadline is Michigan’s deadline of November 15, 2015. The South Carolina presidential primary will be February 20, 2016, so the deadline is 143 days before the primary, which seems excessively early. No other state has a presidential primary deadline that is more than 115 days before the presidential primary.

Marco Rubio has already paid the $40,000. See this story.

On Monday, July 27, U.S. District Court Judge James M. Moody heard oral arguments in Moore v Martin, e.d., 4:14cv-65. The issue is the March petition deadline in effect in 2014 for non-presidential independent candidates to submit their petitions. The argument lasted 90 minutes. Judge Moody indicated a decision will be out in two or three weeks.

Chuck Sweeny, senior political editor for the Rockford (Illinois) Register Star, writes here that the August 6 Fox Republican presidential debate is badly planned. The top ten Republicans, based on polls, will participate.

Sweeny says that instead, Fox News should hold two debates, each with eight candidates. Random procedures should be used to determine which eight candidates are in each debate. To make the two debates equal in viewership, they should both be in the evening, so that would probably involve debates on two different evenings (Sweeny doesn’t say this but it seems to follow from what he does say). Sweeny says many polls only have 300 or so respondents and the Fox News decision is not only unfair, it is arbitrary because there continues to be a virtual tie for tenth place and also ninth place.