On July 3, the Ninth Circuit upheld California law that requires independent candidates for Congress and partisan state office to have “No party preference” on the ballot instead of the label “independent.” However, the ruling leaves open for a future lawsuit the related issue of whether the law is unconstitutional as applied to members of unqualified parties; the law requires “no party preference” for them as well. The case is Chamness v Bowen, 11-56303.

The 26-page opinion says there is no evidence that “no party preference”, instead of “independent”, injures independent candidates. The decision does not mention the point that California still permits independent presidential candidates to use the word “independent” on the ballot. The opinion suggests that it is rational for California to bar the word “independent”, because otherwise there might be confusion with candidates who are members of the American Independent Party. The decision does not mention the decisions of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the Minnesota Supreme Court that ruled “independent” is too basic a word to be banned for independent candidates.

Footnotes four and five of the decision both say that this opinion does not express any opinion as to whether or not it is unconstitutional to force a member of an unqualified party to be forced to have “no party preference” on the ballot. Footnote five, on page 18, says that the 1980 California Supreme Court decision Libertarian Party of California v Eu does not control that issue, and ends by saying, “We therefore express no views as to the validity of California’s restriction against stating preferences for non-qualified parties.” The largest and most active non-qualified parties in California are the Reform Party, the Constitution Party, and the Justice Party; all three of them are political bodies, which means the Secretary of State recognizes that they are trying to qualify and instructs county election officials to keep a tally of their registration figures, so the state will know if they ever do qualify or re-qualify.

The Secretary of State of Nevada issues monthly tallies for the number of registered voters in each party. This news story notes that the Libertarian Party is the only one of Nevada’s four ballot-qualified parties that gained registrants during June. The number of independent voters, like the number of voters in the Democratic, Republican, and Independent American Parties, also declined during June. Here is a link to the part of the Secretary of State’s web page that has voter registration data.

On July 1, opponents of Arizona’s HB 2305 filed paperwork to start circulating a referendum petition. If the petition gets 86,405 valid signatures by September 12, 2013, it cannot go into effect until the voters vote on it. HB 2305 is opposed by Arizona’s three ballot-qualified minor parties because it makes it much more difficult for a member of those parties to get on a primary ballot, and also to be nominated by write-in at their own party’s primary. The bill is opposed by Democrats and organizations of Hispanic voters because it makes it illegal for them to collect voted absentee ballots and turn them in to election officials. It also toughens procedural rules for initiative petitions, and makes it more difficult for voters to remain on the permanent list of absentee voters. See this story.