On April 4, attorneys for the California Secretary of State filed this brief, explaining why the Secretary of State has refused to let the Independent Party attempt to qualify for the California ballot. The brief says that if the Independent Party were to become recognized, voters would confuse the Independent Party with the American Independent Party, which has been on the California ballot since 1968. The brief also says that if the Independent Party were ballot-qualified, voters would be confused between nominees of the Independent Party and independent presidential candidates.
The brief does not mention any of the opinions from around the U.S. that have said that allowing two parties to be on the ballot, even though they both used a particular word in their names, does not cause voter confusion. The only precedent the state uses is Timmons v Twin Cities Area New Party, which upheld a Minnesota law that prevented two different parties from jointly nominating the same candidate and having both party names on the general election ballot next to that candidate’s name. The state’s brief does not mention the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Norman v Reed, which ruled that Illinois improperly barred the Harold Washington Party from using its preferred name when it was attempting to get on the ballot for Cook County partisan county offices in 1990.
Many other states have had ballot-qualified parties named Independent Party, including Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, and Vermont.
The government brief is internally contradictory, when it says that “independent” should be barred from the ballot on the grounds that it is too close to the name of the American Independent Party. Other parts of the brief acknowledge that California already permits the word “independent” as a label for presidential candidates who qualify for the November ballot by petition (although California does not permit the word “independent” as a ballot label for any candidates for Congress or partisan state office).
California has no law saying a party cannot be called “Independent Party.” Tennessee had such a law, but it was declared unconstitutional in 2012 on First Amendment grounds.
