On June 19, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed HB 2305, the omnibus election law bill. Among other things, it makes it exceedingly difficult for a member of a small ballot-qualified party member to get on his or her own party’s primary ballot.

Jan Brewer has never been a friend of ballot access. In 2005, when she was Secretary of State, she persuaded the legislature to pass her bill to provide that if a candidate tried to petition onto a ballot, and failed, then the same candidate was barred from being a write-in candidate.

The ballot access restriction requires approximately 5,500 signatures of party members to get on a statewide primary ballot. This is not difficult for major party members, because the major parties have hundreds of thousands of members, but it is very difficult to get 5,500 valid signatures from a party like the Libertarian, Green, or Americans Elect Party, which have much smaller registration. If the small parties invite independent voters into their primary, then independent voters can also sign primary petitions.

In 1985, a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania struck down a requirement that a member of the Consumer Party (which had 7,000 registrants) needed 2,000 signatures of party members to get on the Consumer Party primary ballot. Consumer Party v Davis, 606 F.Supp. 1008 (eastern district). UPDATE: see this story about the bill in Tucson’s daily newpaper, the Arizona Daily Star.

Mike Duggan, a leading candidate for Mayor of Detroit, won’t appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court to regain his spot on the ballot. See this story. The end of the story has a link to the State Court of Appeals decision that kept him off the ballot. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.

Wyoming voter registration cards list the qualified parties, and also give voters a chance to register as independents. But the forms do not permit anyone to register into a party that has gone off the ballot. Surprisingly, though, registration in Americans Elect and the Country Party have both risen since November 2012. Both parties were removed from the ballot and from voter registration forms after that election was over. The parties were removed for failing the vote test, which required them to poll 2% for U.S. House.

In November 2012, Americans Elect only had 9 registrants in the state, and the Country Party only had 21. But in the June 10, 2013 registration tally, Americans Elect has 41 registrants and the Country Party has 66. Voters registering into these parties are obviously using voter registration cards that were printed last year and which still list those parties. This information was gathered by contacting each county elections office, because the Secretary of State’s web page registration data lumps the two parties into an “other” column. There are also a tiny number of Wyoming voters still registered in the Reform Party and the Natural Law Party, parties which haven’t been qualified for a decade.