EIGHT WINS, SEVEN LOSSES IN BALLOT ACCESS CASES

During August, minor parties and independents won eight lawsuits or challenges, and lost seven.  However, not all the cases are over.

Winning Cases

Illinois:  on August 23, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., won his challenge process and will appear on the ballot.  The decision says that it doesn’t matter if he was recently a registered Democrat; he can still be an independent candidate in Illinois.  It says his address was not sworn to on his paperwork, so it doesn’t matter if there is evidence that he doesn’t live at his designated New York state address.

Some of his petitioners had worked on other petitions in other states this year.  Also some of them had worked on Kennedy’s independent petitions in other states.  Illinois is the only state that won’t let petitioners work for a general election candidate if they had worked on other petitions that year.  The decision says that the petitioners who circulated general election petitions in other states (either for Kennedy or some other minor party or independent candidate) can circulate for Kennedy in Illinois.  But petitioners who worked on Republican or Democratic primary petitions in other states can’t circulate for him.  Fortunately, even after those signatures were subtracted, he still had enough.

Maine:  on August 21, the Secretary of State dismissed the challenge to Cornel West’s petition.  The challengers had said he didn’t have enough valid signatures, but they wanted to disallow all signatures in which the signer used a nickname instead of a formal first name.  They also wanted to reject all signatures in which the signer included the month and day of signing, but not the year.

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On September 10, U.S. District Court Judge William C. Griesbach, a Bush Jr. appointee, issued an order in Marshall v Wisconsin Election Commission, e.d., 1:24cv-1095. He refused to put Shiva Ayyadurai on the ballot as an independent candidate, even though the petition had enough valid signatures. The reason is that Ayyadurai was born in India.

The four-page order says the case is frivolous on its face. Yet the issues are not frivolous, and were the subject of extensive briefing in Trump v Anderson. It does not follow logically that just because a presidential candidate does not meet the constitutional qualifications, that he or she cannot run for President. This is true partly because the presidential electors are the true candidates in November. It is also true because the Twentieth Amendment specifically provides for procedures when presidential electors in December choose a president who doesn’t meet the qualifications. It also ignores the fact that in the past, Wisconsin did print the name of a vice-presidential nominee on the ballot even though he was age 33.

Ayyadurai plans to appeal, although there is no possibility that he can be on the ballot this year.

On August 30, the Louisiana Secretary of State wrote a letter to independent presidential candidate Shiva Ayyadurai, telling him that his place on the ballot was rejected because he had chosen the partisan label “independent”, and that word is prohibited because there is a ballot-qualified Independent Party in Louisiana.

Louisiana election procedures say that if a ballot label is rejected, the Secretary will communicate with the candidate to let him or her choose a different label. But the Secretary of State did not communicate that message. Also the letter didn’t arrive until August 30. And even though the letter said his filing fee check was being returned, the check was not returned.