New Jersey state elections officials are among the kindest and most cooperative of the election officials of any state. Recently the New Jersey elections department approved the idea that petitions for presidential ballot access, for independent candidates and for the nominees of unqualified parties, may be circulated with no presidential or vice-presidential candidates listed. These petitions must instead carry the names of presidential elector candidates.

The purpose of this idea is to make it possible for groups to circulate the petition before they have chosen their national ticket. The elector candidates would tell the state whom they are pledged to, once they know the names of the presidential and vice-presidential ticket. That notification can be later than the actual petition deadline, which is always in late July.

It would be very good if states such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Alabama, would also approve this idea. Those states won’t permit stand-in presidential candidates on petitions because they feel placing stand-in presidential candidates mislead the voters who are asked to sign. So, logically, the way to solve that problem is to simply leave the presidential and vice-presidential candidates off the petition, and simply include the presidential elector candidates and the party label on the petition.

The Kansas independent candidate petition is noon on August 6. The independent candidate petition for Jill Stein was submitted on the afternoon of August 6, but the Secretary of State rejected the petition because it was filed a few hours after noon.

However, it is probable that the petition didn’t have enough valid signatures anyway. The law requires 5,000, but the petition only had 5,520 signatures. All the signatures were gathered in the week before the deadline. The party couldn’t get started sooner because it took time to find a list of candidates for presidential elector.

On August 9, the Sixth Circuit issued a 7-page order, denying the request of Tennessee election officials to remove the Green Party and the Constitution Party from the November 2012 ballot. However, the Sixth Circuit did grant the state’s request for a stay of the U.S. District Court order that said there must be a random procedure to give each party an equal chance to get the top line on the ballot.

In February 2012, a U.S. District Court in Tennessee had struck down the state’s ballot access law for newly-qualifying parties, and had also ordered the state to print the two plaintiff parties on the 2012 ballot. The U.S. District Court had also struck down the law, giving the two largest parties the best spots on the ballot.

The Sixth Circuit has not decided any of these issues at this time. Instead, the Court simply set forth what rules should be in place, pending a decision. The order says, “The state has not shown why the plaintiffs’ past support – which, as noted by the district court, consists of nearly 20,000 votes for the Green Party and almost 10,000 signatures for the Constitution Party – is so insubstantial as to create a real possibility of frustrating the State’s democratic process.” The reference to the 10,000 signatures for the Constitution Party, and the 20,000 votes for the Green Party, is to past elections, not anything related to this year’s election.