On February 26, the Center for Competitive Democracy filed an amicus curiae brief in Libertarian Party of New Hampshire v Gardner, the case pending in the First Circuit. The issue is the 2014 New Hampshire law that made it illegal to circulate the party petition in an odd year.
On February 26, the Florida Secretary of State released new data on how many registered voters there are in each party. Compared to October 2014, the percentage of Republicans has risen from 34.97% to 35.45%. The Democratic percentage has declined from 38.79% to 37.89%. The percentage of voters registered in qualified minor parties has dropped from 2.95% to 2.79%. The number of independent voters has risen from 23.29% to 23.87%.
Here is a link to the new data.
Here is a link to the October 2014 data, which had been the most recent report that includes all qualified parties, until today’s data was released.
On February 26, the Attorney General of South Dakota wrote a letter to attorneys for the Libertarian and Constitution Parties. Those two parties are currently suing South Dakota over the March 29 deadline to submit a petition for party status. The letter says the parties, or any parties, don’t need a petition if they just want to be on the general election ballot for President and for statewide state executive positions other than Governor (i.e., Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Public Utilities Commissioner, etc.)
Until this letter arrived, virtually everyone had believed that a group could not become a qualified party in South Dakota unless it submitted a petition of 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, which, this year, is 6,936 signatures.
In South Dakota, parties nominate by convention for some offices, and with primaries for other office. The letter says that parties can be on the general election ballot, with no petition, for all the offices in which state law says parties use conventions. That includes presidential elector, of course. The 6,936 signatures are only needed if the new party wants to nominate for Governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, or state legislature.
An anonymous group of Republican Party donors has asked a Republican political consulting firm to research how an independent presidential candidate can get on state ballots. See this document. Here is a Politico story about the report. The authors of the report seem to miss the fact that procedures for a new party in Delaware, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas, are far easier than the requirements to be an independent presidential candidate. The firm is Data Targeting.
The Gazette-Democrat has this story about the decision of U.S. District Court Judge James Moody not to enjoin the Arkansas law that says convention parties must choose all their nominees at least a year before the general election.
What the story does not say, and what the judge does not say, is that in 1996, another U.S. District Court Judge in Arkansas struck down the law saying a new party must submit its petition by January of the election year. If it is unconstitutional to require a new party to complete its petition for party status by January of the election year, then it should be obvious that it can’t be constitutional to require a new party to choose all its nominees before November of the odd year before the election.
Judge Moody’s claim that if the Libertarian Party, and other newly-qualifying parties, were allowed to nominate in the election year, that would cause “voter confusion” is unsupported by any logic or evidence. And the judge’s statement that it is constitutional for a state to require that all candidates (whether running in a primary, or being nominated in a convention, or getting on the general election ballot by petition) file simultaneously has been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court four times: Anderson v Celebrezze, Mandel v Bradley, Lendall v Jernigan, and Salera v Tucker. As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Jenness v Fortson, “Sometimes the grossest discrimination can lie in treating things that are different as though they were exactly alike.”
