On August 24, backers of the initiative in Arizona for a top-two open primary filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the petition does have enough valid signatures. See this story. UPDATE: opponents of the initiative have also filed a lawsuit, alleging that many of the signatures accepted by elections officials should be rejected, because they were collected by ex-felons. See this story.
Maryland is one of the few states that requires a statewide independent candidate to submit more signatures than are needed for an entire new party. Maryland requires 10,000 signatures for a new party but a petition of 1% of the number of registered voters for a statewide independent candidate. This year statewide independents in Maryland need 34,713 signatures.
On June 25, S. Rob Sobhani filed approximately 77,000 signatures in order to be on the ballot as an independent candidate for U.S. Senate. He is an expert on the Middle East and has written two books. His web page is robsobhani.com. That is not a campaign web page, just a personal web page with information about him. Thanks to Bob Johnston for this news.
The State Board of Elections has had to work very hard on validating this petition. The validation process is still not complete. If the petition is valid, Sobhani will be the first statewide independent candidate to qualify since Ross Perot in 1992.
Three parties have filed petitions to have their presidential nominees on the Virginia ballot, the Constitution, Green, and Libertarian Parties. The deadline was on August 24. The state requires 10,000 valid signatures.
Virginia permits petitions to be submitted on a flow basis, so the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party had been submitting signatures for several weeks and having them verified. As of August 20, the Constitution Party had submitted 20,673 signatures, and they had been validated. Also as of August 20, the Libertarian Party had submitted approximately 15,000 signatures, and 9,700 had been validated, so the party turned in a supplemental petition on the deadline. The distribution requirement of 400 signatures per U.S. House district had been met for each of the two petitions.
The Green Party submitted 15,700 signatures on the deadline. However, approximately 3,000 of them had been collected before April, when the list of electors (which must include one for each U.S. House district) had been drawn up based on the old districts. Two of the electors were placed into different districts. The party tried to substitute, but the State Board of Elections refused, even though in 1989 a U.S. District Court in Virginia ruled in El-Amin v State Board of Elections that the U.S. Constitution requires that unqualified parties (and committees supporting independent candidates) be permitted to substitute new nominees for all partisan office, and even though the Election Code authorizes such substitution.
The State Board of Elections earlier said the election code section involving substitution in general does not apply to presidential elections, because presidential elections are in a separate part of the election code. The election code sections dealing with presidential elections also authorize substitution, but only for President and Vice-President, not for presidential electors. Probably the legislature intended to include presidential electors, and wrote the law badly.
Virginia has no residency requirement for presidential electors chosen by the qualified parties. In Virginia, only the Democratic and Republican Parties are ballot-qualified. The Green Party’s attorney hopes to persuade the Board to accept the petitions with the outdated list of presidential electors, and will probably sue if the Board does not accept all the petitions.
Colorado counties each have a Canvass Board, charged with helping election officials reconcile election data after any election. According to this story, new regulations will allow qualified minor parties to have representatives on county canvass boards, and there is also now a procedure for representatives of independent candidate campaigns. Scroll down to the party of the story headed “Canvass Board Rules.”
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has this op-ed, criticizing Virginia election law for not allowing any appeal once elections officials determine that a petition doesn’t have enough valid signatures.
