The Arkansas Secretary of State has determined that Better for America has enough signatures on its petition to be a party, for purposes of the presidential election. Better for America has not formally nominated any presidential candidate yet, but it expected to nominate Evan McMullin.
Erik Wells is an independent candidate for County Clerk of Kanawha County, West Virginia. His petition has enough valid signatures, but his ballot position is being challenged because he is a registered Democrat. See this story. West Virginia has no law saying an independent candidate cannot be a member of a political party.
On August 9, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Hornak, an Obama appointee, enjoined a Pennsylvania law barring out-of-state circulators, as applied to a particular referendum petition. OpenPittsburgh.Org v Wolosik, w.d., 2:16cv-1075. The specific law enjoined is P.S. 2869(a), which also covers the ban as applied to petitions to get on a primary ballot. That is a different statute than the statute banning out-of-state circulators for minor party and independent candidate petitions, which had already been invalidated.
The defendant had complained that the case had been filed too late. It was filed July 22, 2016. But the judge said that if the case had been filed sooner, then the government would have argued that there wasn’t enough evidence yet of harm. The proponents of the referendum petition were able to show that the ban on out-of-state circulators was threatening their ability to complete the petition drive.
Here is a link to the referendum petition’s proponents, explaining the purpose of the referendum.
On August 9, Rocky De La Fuente filed a brief in his case against the California requirement that an independent presidential candidate submit 178,039 signatures to get on the ballot. De La Fuente v Padilla, c.d., 2:16cv-3242. No other candidate, except a presidential candidate, ever needs more than 65 signatures to get on a California ballot for partisan office. No one has complied with the California statewide independent petition requirement since 1992. De La Fuente is the first independent presidential candidate in California history to sue against the independent presidential petition, which has been in the law since 1976.
On August 9, the daily newspaper for Champaign and Urbana, Illinois, the News-Gazette, editorialized that the Illinois law requiring independent candidates for U.S. House to submit a petition of 5% of the last vote cast is not fair. See the editorial here. The only states that require more than 10,000 signatures for an independent candidate for U.S. House are Illinois, Georgia, and North Carolina.
