The History News Network is a ten-year-old forum for historians. The purpose of the site is to carry articles by historians that help put current events into historical perspective. Recently the Network carried two op-eds about Americans Elect. Here is the first submission, by Robert Brent Toplin, which ran on March 26. Here is a somewhat different perspective, by J. David Gillespie, which ran on April 9.
On April 12, Wisconsin state election officials determined that the Americans Elect petition has enough valid signatures. The state requires 10,000, and Americans Elect had submitted 17,000. Wisconsin now has four qualified parties. The others are Republican, Democratic, and Constitution.
Groups that are not qualified parties can still place nominees on the November ballot, with the party label, if they file independent candidate petitions. The independent petition for statewide nominees is 2,000 signatures.
On May 8, U.S. District Court Judge Graham Mullen will hear Pisano v Bartlett, 3:12-192, in Charlotte. The hearing is set for 2 p.m. The case challenges the May petition deadline for petitions for newly-qualifying parties. North Carolina does not provide a primary for newly-qualifying parties, so there seems to be little state interest in requiring the petitions that early. The lawsuit was filed on March 27 by the Constitution Party, and on April 6, the complaint was amended to add the Green Party.
In 1988, the North Carolina State Board of Elections was so certain that the May petition deadline was too early to be constitutional, it set the deadline aside and accepted the petition from the New Alliance Party in mid-July. The statutory deadline has been in May since 1979. Originally it was in August, then it was moved to July in 1949, and to May in 1979.
On April 12, the Federal Election Commission considered whether to let U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein raise more money from contributors who had already given her the maximum donation, for he re-election campaign this year. See this story, which says the FEC Commissioners spent considerable time talking about the case, but didn’t come to a conclusion. The FEC will consider the request again on April 26.
The reason for Feinstein’s request is that the money she raised originally was stolen by her campaign treasurer, and she has little hope of recovering more than a fraction of that money.
On April 4, Bruce Shuttleworth, a candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. House, 8th district, was told that he was 18 signatures short. He had submitted 1,823 signatures, but he was told that only 982 were valid.
On April 6, he filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, eastern district, complaining that his petition had been improperly rejected. Some of the signatures had been invalidated because one of his circulators lives in the District of Columbia. The Complaint does not directly attack the ban on out-of-state circulators, but does allege the ban is unconstitutional. The complaint also says, accurately, that after the district residency requirement was declared unconstitutional in Lux v Judd on February 8, there was no residency requirement whatsoever for petitioners. The old law said the circulator had to live in the district, and once it was declared unconstitutional, there was no law concerning the residency of circulators. When the legislature repealed the ban on out-of-district circulators, it added a requirement that circulators be Virginia residents, but the bills that did that, SB 613 and HB 1133 (identical bills) weren’t in effect when much of the petitioning was carried out.
Also, the complaint points out that even after the new law took effect, the State Board of Elections continued to give out misinformation.
On April 9, after the lawsuit had been filed, elections officials, working with Democratic Party officials, determined that Shuttleworth has enough valid signatures after all. Some of his petition sheets had been lost but were found again. It is not clear at this moment if the lawsuit will go forth. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge John A. Gibney, who wrote earlier this year in Perry v Judd that an in-state residency requirement is almost certainly unconstitutional. But Judge Gibney also declined to put Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum on the Democratic presidential primary ballot because he said the candidates had filed their lawsuit too late. Thanks to Scott Thomas for this news.
