The Times Record of Fort Smith, Arkansas, has this commentary about the oral argument in Moore v Martin. That argument, held on July 27, concerns the federal lawsuit on early petition deadlines for non-presidential independent candidates.
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Phil Huckelberry has this article in Gapers Block, advocating that Illinois depend on candidate filing fees instead of petitions, for ballot access. Gapers Block is a well-read on-line Chicago newspaper about government and politics.
The Tulsa World, in this editorial, congratulates the Oklahoma Democratic Party for letting independents vote in its future primaries.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a story that tries to analyze whether Ohio Governor John Kasich will be in the August 6 Fox News Republican presidential debate. See it here. The answer is ambiguous and depends on which polls are used.
Candidates who intend to run in the South Carolina Republican Party presidential primary will be required to pay a filing fee of $40,000. There is no alternate method for getting on the ballot, even for candidates who say they don’t have the money.
Candidates file with the party, but, by law, the party gives $20,000 of that fee to the government to help pay for election administration. The party keeps the other $20,000 and the party need not pay any election administration costs for its primary.
The filing deadline for the Republican presidential primary is September 30, 2015. The party, not the government, chose that date. It is easily the earliest filing deadline for presidential primaries in any state. The next-earliest deadline is Michigan’s deadline of November 15, 2015. The South Carolina presidential primary will be February 20, 2016, so the deadline is 143 days before the primary, which seems excessively early. No other state has a presidential primary deadline that is more than 115 days before the presidential primary.
Marco Rubio has already paid the $40,000. See this story.