On October 5, Americans Elect announced that it is about to start circulating its petition to be a party in Tennessee. See this story. If the group succeeds, it will be the first time any group has successfully completed the Tennessee party petition since 1968.

The old procedure was held unconstitutional in 2010, but the 2011 legislature made only miniscule improvements. The legislature did not reduce the number of signtures, which is 40,042 (2.5% of the 2010 gubernatorial vote). The legislature moved the petition deadline from March to April. A lawsuit now pending in U.S. District Court, filed by the Constitution and Green Parties, alleges that the early April petition deadline is still too early.

Matt Miller, a Washington Post columnist who has already written supportedly about Americans Elect, has this new column. He says Americans Elect ought to run candidates for Congress as well as President. His column also reveals some interesting details about the Americans Elect presidential nomination process.

Last year, a consortium of Ohio newspapers sponsored a general election U.S. Senate debate and invited only the Democratic and Republican Party nominees into that debate. The Socialist Party nominee, Dan La Botz, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, because the sponsors had not set any objective standards on who could qualify for that debate. But the FEC took no action, so early this year La Botz sued the FEC.

Here is the 34-page La Botz brief, which was filed on September 23. The FEC asked for more time to respond, and the court granted the request. The FEC brief is now due October 11. This is an interesting lawsuit. Generally, debate sponsors are sophisticated enough to set objective criteria before issuing invitations to the debate. This is often a requirement that a candidate poll at some particular level of support. But the Ohio debate sponsors did not do that; they just said they were only inviting the two candidates who “obviously” had the most support. Furthermore, even if that could possibly be considered an “objective” criteria, the debate sponsors did not make this criteria public, before they set up the debate.