Hawaii held primaries on August 9, during a severe tropical storm. Although two particular precincts were permitted to vote again in the following week, many other voters who don’t live in those two particular precincts were also unable to travel to the polls. On August 21, some of them filed an original case with the State Supreme Court, asking for relief. Here is the Complaint. The ACLU is handling this case for the voters.
The Blade, Toledo’s daily newspaper, has this story about Jack Ford, an independent candidate for State Senate who was removed from the November 2014 ballot because he voted in the May 2014 Democratic primary. Ford says he asked for a ballot without any partisan races on it, but he was given a Democratic primary ballot, and he then used it.
Ford is a city councilmember in Toledo and would have been a formidable candidate.
Accordeing to this story, Jim Sherow, Democratic Party nominee for Kansas U.S. House, district one, has endorsed Greg Orman for U.S. Senate. Orman is the independent candidate in the race. The Democratic Party has its own nominee for U.S. Senate, but Sherow says new polls show that Orman has a better chance of winning than the Democratic nominee does. Orman has raised more money than any other independent congressional candidate this year, other than Marianne Williamson in California. Orman is about to launch television advertising for himself.
On August 21, U.S. District Court Judge John J. Tharp, Jr., declined to put the Green Party statewide nominees on the Illinois ballot. The case is Summers v Smart, 1:14cv-5398, northern district. However, the 20-page opinion suggests that the full-slate requirement is likely unconstitutional, and also suggests that the notarization requirement may be unconstitutional. But because the party complied with the full-slate requirement, and also did notarize all the petition sheets it submitted, the opinion says enjoining either or both of those two laws would not make any difference this year. The party did not submit as many as 25,000 valid signatures in any event.
The Opinion says, “This is a situation of the plaintiffs’ own making. Rather than bring a timely lawsuit to enjoin the provisions that the Plaintiffs allege to be unconstitutional in themselves and collectively – the complete slate requirement, the notarization requirement, and the binder-check rules – the plaintiffs waited to sue until the only possible preliminary injunctive remedy was to place them on the ballot notwithstanding the allegedly overburdensome ballot access requirements.” UPDATE: here is a news story.
The Chicago Times has this story, saying armed private detectives rang doorbells of voters who signed the Libertarian Party’s statewide candidate petition. The story says these detectives then tried to persuade the voters to sign affidavits, disavowing their signature.
As the voter quoted at the end of the story says, the experience will cause him (and surely others as well) never to sign a ballot access petition again.
