According to this article, Karl Tatgenhorst, the Libertarian Party nominee for Secretary of State of Indiana, will campaign partly on a platform of easing Indiana ballot access laws.

Indiana has the nation’s most severe law in the nation for candidates who want to get on a presidential primary ballot. Years after the 2008 Indiana presidential primary was over, Democratic Party officials in Indiana were convicted of forging names on the petitions of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but their motivation was that without the forgery, the petitions for each of them would have failed.

Worse yet are the Indiana laws for minor party and independent candidates. Indiana is one of only two states in which no petition to get a presidential candidate on the November ballot has succeeded in any of the last three presidential elections; the other such state is Georgia. While there is considerable agitation to improve the Georgia ballot access laws, there has been little commentary or activism about this problem in Indiana in the recent past.

The Libertarian Party has safely been on the ballot in Indiana starting in 1994, because it always meets the vote test to stay on, polling 2% for Secretary of State every four years. But the Constitution Party, the Green Party, the Natural Law, and Ralph Nader, never appeared on any Indiana statewide ballot. Indiana, Oklahoma and Georgia are the only three states about which that statement is true.

On May 23, the Oklahoma legislature made a surprise decision to adjourn that very day, a week before the expected adjournment date. Therefore, HB 2134, the ballot access bill, did not pass. Even though it had passed both houses of the legislature, the two houses passed different versions. The conference committee had met and agreed on final wording, but there was no opportunity for each house to vote on the revised bill. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.

On May 23, an Arkansas Circuit Court again ruled that the Arkansas law requiring voters at the polls to show government photo ID violates the State Constitution. See this story. This time, his decision does not suffer from the procedural flaw that affected the same court’s first ruling. The new decision is Kohls v Martin, an ACLU case. The judge stayed his own decision, because the state says it will appeal.

The first decision was Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners v Pulaski County Election Commission. That decision had been reversed by the State Supreme Court on May 14, because neither side in that case had asked that the voter ID law be declared unconstitutional. The new case doesn’t suffer from that impediment.