Recently, the Constitutional Court, Indonesia’s highest court, struck down a ballot access restriction on independent candidates in regional elections. See this story.
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Larry Lessig is a well-known professor who is seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He probably won’t be in the first Democratic presidential debate set for October 13 because he is not averaging 1% in the polls. But that is because most polls have not included him. He is at 1% or better in the few polls that have mentioned him.
In this Politico piece, he documents deficiencies in the process of getting him into the polls. He puts a great deal of blame on the national Democratic Party’s refusal to consider him a “real” candidate. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
On October 1, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Heffernan v City of Paterson, New Jersey, 14-1280. The individual who brought the case had been a police detective who was demoted because he was seen with a campaign sign in his car. The lower court, the Third Circuit, upheld his firing. See this story.
This article in the National Post says Canada has 338 House of Commons districts, and almost 1,800 candidates are on the ballot. That works out to 5.3 candidates per district. Four parties have a candidate in all or virtually all districts.
By comparison, in the United States in November 2014, approximately half the districts only had two or fewer candidates on the ballot. Even the Democratic Party didn’t have candidates in 36 of the 435 districts; even the Republicans didn’t have candidates in 41 of the districts.
Ballot access in Canada is equal for every candidate. Every candidate submits 100 signatures and pays a filing fee of $1,000 Canadian dollars. For ballot access purposes, there is no such thing as a ballot-qualified party.
The Arkansas Secretary of State’s office has determined that the petition to place Jim Hedges on the November 2016 ballot as a presidential candidate is valid. This is the first time a Prohibition Party petition for a presidential nominee has succeeded since 1996. Although the party’s nominee for president appeared in a handful of states in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, in all those four elections all the states in which the party qualified did not require a petition (Florida, Louisiana, Colorado).
In 1996 the party completed petitions in Tennessee and Utah.
Hedges used the independent petition procedure, not the procedure for a minor party that wants to be on for President only. So his ballot label in Arkansas will be “independent.”