New York’s presidential primary is April 19. According to this story, the State Board is getting approximately 100 phone complaints per day from voters who are too late to register into either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, so as to be able to vote in those parties’ presidential primaries. New York easily has the nation’s most restrictive time limits on when voters can join a party if they wish to vote in an upcoming primary.
April 4 was the New Jersey deadline for presidential candidates running in a presidential primary. Each candidate needed 1,000 signatures of registered members of the party. Only two Democrats filed: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Only three Republicans filed: Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Donald Trump.
This year, New Jersey has the latest deadline for presidential primary candidates to file.
The federal lawsuit over whether the Maine Libertarian Party can be on the ballot in 2016 convened for a second day of testimony and argument on April 5. This newspaper story describes the hearing. It reveals that the main reason the party’s registration drive had so many rejected cards is because the applicants had poor handwriting.
On April 5, the Yakima, Washington, city council voted to drop the city’s appeal in a case over how city councilmembers are elected. A U.S. District Court had invalidated the city’s at-large elections for city council and ordered district elections, based on the federal Voting Rights Act.
See this story. This was an ACLU case. The city had been hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court might issue an opinion in the Texas Evanwel case that would help it, but instead, on April 4, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of traditional districting principles.
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.
