The Hawaii Attorney General has prepared a formal opinion that improves ballot access for the presidential nominees of unqualified parties. The opinion says that when an unqualified party uses the independent presidential petition procedure, the party label should be printed on the ballot, instead of just “non-partisan.”

The Hawaii independent presidential petition procedure has a September deadline, one of the latest deadlines of any state. Therefore, as a result of the decision, it can be said that Hawaii has a September petition deadline for unqualified parties to appear on the ballot, but for president and vice-president only.

As a result, Alabama now has the nation’s earliest petition deadline for a new or previously unqualified to qualify for the presidential ballot with the party label. This fact will be helpful to the Constitution, Green, and Libertarian Parties in their ongoing litigation against that Alabama March petition deadline. The case is pending in the Eleventh Circuit.

The New Mexico Supreme Court has declined to hear Constitution Party of New Mexico v Duran, 34431. Any Supreme Court is always free to decline to hear a case filed directly with that court. The decision not to hear the case is not a decision on the merits, and the case can be re-filed in a lower state court.

The issue is whether the Secretary of State of New Mexico was correct to remove the Constitution Party from the ballot. The New Mexico Supreme Court never ever learned that the Secretary of State’s brief, asking the Court not to take the case, has important factual errors. The state’s brief told the court that in the past, parties were always removed after just one election if they didn’t meet the vote test. This is not true. Furthermore, the state’s brief did not even quote the complete sentence in section 1-7-2 that describes when a party must be removed from the ballot. The state’s brief did not include the first half of the sentence, which starts out “If two successive general elections are held…”

The New Mexico Green Party is in the same situation as the Constitution Party. Both parties successfully petitioned in 2012, expecting they would get the next two elections, but so far they are both off the ballot for 2014.