On December 26, attorneys for the state of Alabama filed a brief in U.S. District Court, asking that the case Hall v Bennett be dismissed without any ruling on whether it is constitutional for Alabama to impose the same severe petition requirements in special elections that it does in regular elections.

Alabama held a special congressional election on December 17. The only petitioning candidate who submitted signatures, independent James Hall, submitted over 3,000 signatures, but was still denied ballot access because the state required almost 6,000. The basis for Hall’s lawsuit was that in a normal election, an independent candidate has at least two years, and potentially longer, to collect the needed signatures. In the case of the special election, though, the petitioning time was severely curtailed. Hall failed to win injunctive relief, but his lawsuit for declaratory relief is still pending.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said that constitutional challenges to ballot access laws are not moot, just because the election is over. The state acknowledges that this is true in regularly-scheduled elections, but argues that each special election is different in its own way, and therefore Hall’s case is moot.

On December 19, proponents of a particular California initiative sued Mono County and Tulare County election officials, for refusing to accept signatures on their initiative. As a result, the petitions were rejected, and the entire initiative may hinge on the disputed signatures. See this story. The case is Gleason v Bowen, 34-2013-80001714, filed in Superior Court in Sacramento.

On December 20, a Montana lower state court struck down an initiative passed in 2012 that orders Montana legislators to work for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. The recent Montana case is Rickert v McCulloch, Lewis and Clark County, cdv-2012-1003.

The initiative said, in part, “Montana’s congressional delegation is charged with proposing a joint resolution offering an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that accomplishes the following: (a) overturns the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC; (b) establishes that corporations are not human beings with constitutional rights; (c) establishes that campaign contributions or expenditures by corporations, whether to candidates or ballot issues, may be prohibited by a political body at any level of government; and (d) accomplishes the goals of Montanans in achieving a level playing field in election spending.”

The recent decision depends on a 1984 Montana Supreme Court opinion, State ex rel Harper v Waltermire, which struck down an initiative that ordered Montana legislators to work for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The recent decision upholds the part of the initiative that says that the voters find that “unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the Montana political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual Montana citizens.” However, it should be noted that Citizens United v FEC did not hold that corporations may make contributions to candidates; it said they can make independent expenditures.