On July 31, at 9 a.m., a Vermont Superior Court in Montpelier will hear Anderson v State of Vermont, 480-6-12. This is the case filed by the Justice Party over Vermont’s awkward procedures for submitting petitions for independent and minor party candidates. For those kind of petitions, Vermont requires the petitioning groups to turn in signatures to each town clerk, then collect the signatures and physically take them to the Secretary of State’s office. Sometimes the town clerks don’t check the petitions very quickly. Rocky Anderson submitted the needed 1,000 valid signatures by the deadline but he is still not on the ballot because the town clerks took too long to check the signatures.

By contrast, primary candidates running for statewide office can submit their petitions directly to the Secretary of State. Federal law requires all state election offices to maintain a statewide list of the registered voters.

On July 16, opponents of Arizona’s top-two open primary initiative filed a lawsuit in state court, charging that the measure violates the Arizona Constitution. The Arizona Constitution, like the state constitution of all states that permit statewide initiatives, requires that initiatives be limited to a single subject. See this story.

UPDATE: here is the complaint. The only group political plaintiffs are the committee formed to oppose the measure, and the Arizona League of Women Voters. The individual voter plaintiffs include Barry Hess, who has run for Governor of Arizona as a Libertarian. The Complaint charges that the measure violates the single-subject rule, and it also charges that the description of the initiative on the petitions is misleading.

On the single subject issue, the initiative abolishes elections for party officers. None of the three other states that have top-two systems (Louisiana, Washington, and California) abolished elections for party office when they started using top-two systems. There seems to be no necessary connection between a top-two system and eliminating elections for party office.

The top-two open primary initiative does not mesh with the existing public funding law in Arizona. The initiative does not attempt to alter the public funding law, but the public funding law assumes that the state has party nominations, and sets out different rules for public funding depending on whether a candidate is running in a district in which one particular party is strongly dominant, versus other types of districts. If the top-two law passes, it would be difficult to reconcile the public funding rules with the top-two system.

According to this story, 43 independent candidates for the South Carolina legislature submitted petitions by the July 16 deadline. South Carolina has probably never had this many signatures to check in any one election year, at any time in the past. South Carolina doesn’t have the initiative or referendum or recall, and candidates running in major party primaries don’t need petitions.

Independent candidates rarely qualify in South Carolina. No independent candidate for either House of Congress has ever appeared on a South Carolina government-printed ballot. Independent candidates for legislature need petitions of 5% of the number of registered voters, which is so severe, few candidates even attempt it. However, this year is different, because approximately 250 candidates who had expected to run in major party primaries were kept off the June 12 primary ballot, and therefore many decided to become independent candidates. In South Carolina, independent candidates appear on the ballot as “By petition” instead of “independent.”