On October 10, the Tennessee Green Party, and the Tennessee Constitution Party, filed a new ballot access lawsuit, Green Party of Tennessee v Hargett, 3:13cv-1128, middle district.

The lawsuit has two points. The first is that because the two parties were put on the ballot by a U.S. District Court in 2012, and because the Sixth Circuit refused to stay that action, therefore the parties should also be on the ballot automatically for the 2014 election. The Tennessee law says that when parties meet the vote test, they should remain ballot-qualified for the next four years.

The second point challenges the law requiring newly-qualifying parties to submit an affidavit that they do not advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence. The affidavit also must say that the parties are not affiliated with any other organization that advocates the overthrow of the government by force or violence. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously invalidated an Indiana law that also required newly-qualifying parties to submit such an affidavit.

On October 8, a New Mexico state court put two candidates for City Council of Las Cruces on the ballot, even though the election is only four weeks from that date. The election is November 5. See this story. The court case was over whether the two candidates really had at least 25 valid signatures.

The absentee ballots had already been printed without the names of the two candidates, but the city clerk has printed up stickers with their names and will add them to the absentee ballots. As a result, the absentee ballots will need to be hand-counted.

The Mischiefs of Faction, a political science blog about political parties, has this piece by Professor Seth Masket about the possibility that the Republican Party might split and a new party might emerge. Masket does not think this is likely, at least in the short term, but it is interesting that he even wrote about the idea.

If the founders of Americans Elect had done what they could to keep their party on the ballot in the 29 states in which it qualified in 2012, that might have been the genesis for a new major party. It is still qualified in California and four other states, but if it doesn’t increase its registration in California by the beginning of 2014, it will lose its spot on the ballot in that state. The drive to put the party on the California ballot required 1,030,040 valid signatures, and probably cost $2,500,000.