On September 6, the Vermont Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ruling of a lower state court that put the Justice Party and its presidential nominee, Rocky Anderson, on the ballot in 2012. The case is Anderson v State of Vermont, 2013-vt-73. Here is the nine-page opinion.

Vermont allows a petition sheet to include signers from different towns. But, Vermont requires the petitioning group to submit the original sheets to each town clerk, and then to come back later and collect the sheets from the town clerks and give them to the Secretary of State. The Justice Party wanted to make photocopies of each petition sheet that had signatures from more than a single town. The purpose of the party’s desire to make photocopies, was that if a sheet had signatures from two towns, then the party could give the original sheet to one of the town clerks, and the photocopy of that same sheet to the other town clerk.

The state forbade photocopying the sheets before submission, so that the party had to take such a sheet to the first town, and then, after the first town clerk had finished checking that sheet, the party had to take the same sheet to the second town clerk, and have that clerk work on that same form. This not only required a lot of driving between towns, it consumed valuable time. The State Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that the ban on photocopying was harmful to the group and not really necessary.

On September 5, U.S. District Court Judge W. Keith Watkins, a George W. Bush appointee, upheld Alabama’s March petition deadline for newly-qualifying party petitions. The case is Stein v Bennett, 2:12-cv-42 and is 24 pages long. Here is the decision.

The decision says that because the Constitution, Green, and Libertarian Parties were able to place their presidential candidates on the ballot as independent candidates, the burden on those presidential candidates, who had the label “independent” is not severe. Of course, the parties put their presidential candidates on the ballot as independents because Alabama requires 5,000 signatures by September for independent presidential petitions, and 44,829 signatures by March if the parties want to appear with the appropriate party label.

The decision relies primarily on the 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision Timmons v Twin Cities Area New Party, which upheld Minnesota’s ban on permitting two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate. The opinion says that if it is constitutional to prevent both parties from having their party labels on the ballot, next to the name of the single candidate they jointly nominated, therefore it follows that it is constitutional to force smaller parties to not appear on the ballot at all, if they can qualify their candidates as independents. This conclusion is not logical.

The decision does not mention that the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1974 in Storer v Brown that states must have constitutional procedures for both newly-qualifying parties and independent candidates. It also does not mention that the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1972 in Bullock v Carter “we can hardly accept as reasonable an alternative that requires candidates and voters to abandon their party affiliations in order to avoid the burden of the filing fees.” Bullock v Carter was a challenge to Texas filing fees. Texas defended the filing fees by saying that candidates who didn’t want to pay the fees could still get on the ballot without a fee if they ran as independent candidates.

The decision does not mention any of the 23 precedents that struck down early petition deadlines for newly-qualifying parties, except that the decision does mention the 1991 New Alliance Party decision that struck down Alabama’s April petition deadline. The decision implies, but does not say outright, that the 1991 decision is no longer good law. The 1991 decision was made by the Eleventh Circuit, a court that is superior in power to any U.S. District Court within the states of the Eleventh Circuit.

All briefs have now been filed in the lawsuit known as “Nomination Papers of Nevin Mindlin for the Office of Mayor of Harrisburg.” The Commonwealth Court will hold an oral argument on September 12, to determine if independent candidate Nevin Mindlin will be on the November 5, 2013 ballot for Mayor of Harrisburg. The issue is whether it is constitutional to force independent candidates to list a “substitution committee” on their petitions. Mindlin says that if he died or became incapacitated, he would not want any other candidate named to replace him, because he is a true independent candidate, and if some unexpected event caused him to terminate his candidacy, he wouldn’t want anyone else named to replace him.

Mindlin also argues that if his failure to name a substitution committee is supposedly fatal to the validity of his petition, the election officials who received his petitions would have told him so. He submitted the petitions on a flow basis, on five different dates far in advance of the petition deadline.

The people who challenged Mindlin’s petition completely fail to respond to the constitutional argument. Mindlin had quoted from the U.S. Supreme Court 1974 decision Storer v Brown, which said that the independent candidate approach to politics is entirely different from the political party approach to politics, and that states are obliged to have procedures for both. But the other side simply responds that Pennsylvania election laws only recognize political parties and political bodies. The opposition misses the point that, to the extent Pennsylvania requires all candidates to be partisan candidates, the law is unconstitutional. The opposition says Mindlin is “cherry-picking” points from Storer v Brown. Actually, Mindlin is merely quoting the part of Storer v Brown that is relevant to this case.

The name of this case may seem peculiar, because the name of a typical lawsuit is “Someone versus Somone.” In Pennsylvania state courts, election lawsuits don’t follow the common tradition, in which the lead plaintiff is listed first, followed by the word “versus” (or “v” for short), and then followed by the name of the lead defendant.

Here is Mindlin’s brief and here is the brief of the challengers.