On February 19, the city council of Fort Collins, Colorado, voted to ban write-in candidates in city elections.

In 1912, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that all ballots must allow write-ins. Littlejohn v People ex rel Desch, 121 P.159, held unconstitutional a Colorado law that banned write-ins in school director elections. The court said, “Every qualified elector shall have an equal right to cast a ballot for the person of his own selection, and that no act shall be done by any power, civil or military, to prevent it. Such is the mandate and spirit of the Constitution (meaning state constitution), and it thereby vests in the elector a constitutional right of which he cannot lawfully be deprived by any governmental power.”

On February 19, the state of Tennessee filed this amicus brief in the Fourth Circuit in Casa, Inc. v Trump, 25-1153. This is one of the lawsuits challenging President Trump’s order on citizenship. Tennessee has filed in support of the Trump action, and says that the state is being harmed by illegal immigration, which is not exactly the same issue.

On February 19, the Wyoming Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee passed HB 173. It had already passed the house. It increases the petition requirement for statewide independents from 2% to 3% of the last vote for U.S. House. It increases the petition for independent legislative candidates from 2% to 5%. It also moves the petition deadline from August to June.

Wyoming already has the most difficult petition requirement for presidential candidates running outside the two major parties, when the states are compared on a percentage basis.

The vote was 4-1. The only “no” vote was from the Chairman of the Committee, Senator Cale Case.