On June 22, Georgia filed a motion to dismiss the ballot access lawsuit filed last month by the Green Party and the Constitution Party. Although the state’s brief is 17 pages long, not once does it mention either of the precedents that the case relies on. The lawsuit is Green Party of Georgia v State of Georgia and Brian Kemp, 1:12-cv-1822. The lawsuit charges that Georgia’s ballot access law, as applied to presidential candidates, requires too many signatures.

The parties base their case on Anderson v Celebrezze, and Bergland v Harris. In Anderson v Celebrezze, the U.S. Supreme Court said that states must be more lenient in presidential elections, than for other office. Bergland v Harris is an 11th circuit decision from 1985 that repeated that holding, and said Georgia’s requirement at that time, for president, might be unconstitutionally difficult. At the time the requirement for president was 2.5% of the number of registered voters. The 11th circuit remanded the case back to the U.S. District Court, but then the legislature lowered the petition requirement to 1% of the number of registered voters and the case ended.

The state’s brief mentions all the ballot access precedents that upheld Georgia’s requirements for office other than President, but nowhere mentions either Anderson v Celebrezze or Bergland v Harris.

“Mischiefs of Faction” is a blog about politics and political scientist, run by four political scientists. Here is a blog post about open primaries written by Seth Masket.

On June 25, the Michigan Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Detroit, seeking an order requiring the Michigan Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson, to list Gary Johnson on the ballot as the Libertarian presidential nominee. The case is Libertarian Party of Michigan v Johnson, 2:12-cv-12782-PDB. Here is the 9-page complaint.

The Secretary of State said on May 3 that she would not print Johnson’s name on the November ballot because his name had appeared on the Republican presidential primary ballot in February this year. Johnson had tried to withdraw but the Secretary of State says his withdrawal was received three minutes too late. There are very few precedents for a case like this, because no state has ever before told a ballot-qualified party that it will not list its actual presidential nominee on the grounds that the actual presidential nominee had run in the presidential primary of some other party. The only exception is that North Carolina tried to prevent John B. Anderson from appearing on the November 1980 ballot as the nominee of the Independent Party, on the grounds that his name had been on the 1980 Republican presidential primary in that state. But a U.S. District Court construed the North Carolina law to not be a barrier to Anderson. The state had then dropped any appeal, but the Democratic National Committee had intervened in the case and appealed to the 4th circuit. However, the 4th circuit also construed the North Carolina law to not apply to Anderson.

Presidential candidates who have run in a major party presidential primary, and then later appeared on the general election ballot as the nominee of a new or minor party that same year, besides Anderson, include Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Robert La Follette in 1924, and David Duke in 1988. Anderson appeared on the November ballot of all 50 states in 1980, even though he had run in 22 Republican presidential primaries that year. One of the 22 Republican presidential primaries Anderson had run in was Michigan’s primary, but Michigan did not try to bar him from the November ballot.