On May 25, the Oklahoma legislature adjourned for the year, without having passed HB 1058. The bill would have lowered the number of signatures for newly-qualifying parties. It passed both houses, but each house passed a different version, and the conference committee never met to reconcile the differences.
On May 25, John Wolfe, Jr., filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Arkansas Democratic Party for refusing to let him choose any delegates to the Democratic national convention. Wolfe polled 42% of the vote in the May 22 presidential primary, with President Obama polling the other 58%. Under the state party rules, he should be entitled to some delegates. But the state party says he should have chosen candidates for delegate before the primary. The case is Wolfe v Arkansas Democratic Party, 4:12cv-314. It was assigned to Judge James M. Moody, a Clinton appointee.
Wolfe is serving as his own attorney, and he says he plans to sue the Louisiana Democratic Party also, in the near future. He got enough popular votes in the Louisiana primary to receive some delegates, but the Louisiana Democratic Party also refuses to let him have any delegates. See this story. Thanks to Andy Hogue for the link.
Arizona has very stringent petition requirements for independent candidates. They need 3% of the number of registered voters who are not members of qualified parties. A few days ago, an independent candidate for Sheriff of Maricopa County submitted 29,764 signatures to meet a requirement of 19,410 signatures. The candidate is Mike Stauffer. He is a registered independent with 29 years of law enforcement experience, and he hopes to defeat the likely Republican nominee, incumbent Joe Arpaio, in November. Stauffer’s web page is www.votestauffer.com.
Maricopa County contains almost 60% of Arizona’s population, and includes Phoenix and many other fairly large cities.
Current Ohio law requires all ballot-qualified parties to certify the names of their presidential and vice-presidential nominees no later than August 8. The Democratic and Republican Parties will not hold their national conventions until several weeks after that date. HB 509 had been expected to pass the Senate on May 24. It says those two parties (but no others) may have until September 7 to make the certifications. The bill has an urgency clause and only pertains to the 2012 election.
For some reason, on May 24, the Ohio Senate decided not to vote on this bill that day. The Senate won’t be in session again until June 5. Assuming the bill passes the Senate on June 5, then it must pass the House. The original bill that already passed the House did not have the election law amendment, so the House needs to re-approve the entire bill after it passes the Senate. The original bill is not an election law bill and concerns venereal disease and other unrelated subjects.
On May 24, attorneys for the Illinois State Board of Elections filed a brief in Libertarian Party of Illinois v Illinois State Board of Elections, 1:12-cv-2511, northern district. The state’s first argument is that the State Board of Elections and its members are not the proper defendants. This is a weak argument. In 1977, the Socialist Workers Party and the U.S. Labor Party filed lawsuits against the Illinois law on how newly-qualifying parties get on the ballot for Mayor of Chicago. Those cases won in U.S. District Court, and in the 7th circuit, and in the U.S. Supreme Court, unanimously. In that case the defendants were the State Board of Elections.
The state also argues that the June petition deadline is needed because when petitions are challenged in Illinois, the challenge process, and court battles over the sufficiency of the signatures, takes a long time. Of course, if Illinois didn’t have such restrictive laws, there wouldn’t be challenges. The problem is of the state’s own making. The state’s brief ignores the point that primary petitions also involve lengthy challenges and yet the deadline between primary petition deadlines and the date of the primary is much shorter. Primary petitions are due 106 days before the primary, but general elections are due 134 days before the general election. If the general election deadline were also 106 days, then the deadline for minor party and independent candidate petitions would be July 23, far better than the actual deadline of June 25.
The state defends its law requiring newly-qualifying parties to submit a full slate of candidates by saying that law had been upheld in state court in 2005. But the state does not acknowledge that back in 2005, independent candidate petitions were due six months earlier than petitions for new parties. The so-called rationale for the full slate back then was that without the full slate rule, independent candidates would create “dummy” new parties to avoid the early petition deadline for independent candidates. But nowadays, as a result of the 2006 ballot access victory in Lee v Keith, the independent candidate petition deadlines are in June, simultaneous with the petition deadline for new parties.
