On April 22, U.S. District Court Judge Andre Birotte upheld a California law that won’t let candidates show their party label on the ballot unless the candidate is a member of a qualified party. Soltysik v Padilla, c.d. cv-15-7916. The plaintiffs were two candidates who are registered as members of the Socialist Party. Because the Socialist Party is not ballot-qualified in California, their ballot label is “party preference: none.”

The decision says that the burden on a candidate to be denied a partisan ballot label is “not severe.” The decision won’t allow a trial so that the plaintiffs can present evidence that the burden is severe. The decision merely assumes that denial of a party label is “not severe”. The decision makes no mention of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Bullock v Carter, 405 U.S. 134 (1972), which says it is not reasonable for Texas to force candidates who can’t pay a filing fee to run for office with no party label.

The decision also does not mention the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Cook v Gralike, 531 U.S. 510 (2001), which said that states cannot discriminate against candidates relative to party labels, and which says, “The adverse labels handicap candidates at the most crucial stage in the election process – the instant before the vote is cast…the labels surely place their targets at a political disadvantage.”

The decision depends on Chamness v Bowen, a Ninth Circuit decision that said California could bar independent candidates from being listed as “independent” on the ballot. But the Chamness decision depends on the fact that the plaintiff presented no evidence that denial of the word “independent” does any harm, and said the outcome might have been different if there had been such evidence. In the Soltysik case, the plaintiff was ready to present evidence that the campaigns are injured by denial of the word “Socialist” on the ballot, but Judge Birotte won’t permit such evidence to be submitted.

Jane Miller, a long-time Republican Party activist in Connecticut, has exhausted all avenues for regaining her ability to vote in the Connecticut Republican presidential primary of April 26. She was expelled from the party last year because in 2013 she had accepted a Democratic Party nomination for local office in Brookfield, where she lives.

She had filed lawsuits in both federal court and state court, and had made a last-ditch request to her local Republican Party, but so far nothing has worked. Here is an article about her April 18 hearing in front of the Republican Party registrar for Brookfield. The federal court had denied a temporary restraining order back on April 12, although the case is still alive. It is Miller v Dunkerton, 3:16v-174.

This blog post is being written on April 24, 2016. Exactly thirty-six years ago, on April 24, 1980, John B. Anderson, who had been seeking the Republican presidential nomination, declared that he was giving up the race for the Republican nomination and would instead run in the general election as an independent candidate. Anderson was very brave to do that, but his courage paid off.

He had already missed the petition deadline in five states: Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, and Ohio. Nevertheless, he circulated petitions in those states, along with the other states where he hadn’t missed the deadline. In July and August 1980 he won his lawsuits against the deadlines in those five states.

He also faced the problem that he hadn’t found a vice-presidential running mate. So he used a stand-in, Milton Eisenhower, who was 90 years old and was deceased President Eisenhower’s older brother. Anderson finally found his actual running mate on August 27, 1980, former Wisconsin Governor Patrick Lucey. By then petitions in almost all states had already been circulated with Eisenhower’s name on them. But Anderson’s attorneys persuaded almost all states to allow Eisenhower to withdraw and to have Lucey be replaced. Anderson sued three states that wouldn’t permit this (Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania) and won all those lawsuits.

Anderson had run in twenty Republican presidential primaries in 1980, and he faced charges that he was ineligible to get on the November ballot as an independent because he was a “sore loser”. But states almost entirely put him on the ballot, without any need for a lawsuit, because Anderson’s attorneys successfully argued that sore loser laws can’t apply to presidential primaries, because presidential primaries don’t nominate presidential candidates; instead they are elections for delegate to national conventions.

Anderson is still living. He is age 94 and is on the board of Fairvote, which works for proportional representation and instant-runoff voting.