North Carolina is the only state that requires presidential write-in candidates to file a petition if they wish their write-ins to be counted. The only presidential candidate who collected the needed 500 signatures this year is Virgil Goode, Constitution Party nominee. This is the only the second time that the Constitution Party has had this status. In 1996, the other time, Howard Phillips was credited with 258 write-in votes.

The three presidential candidates who will have their names printed on the ballot in 2012 are the nominees of the Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian Parties.

In 2008, the Green Party did obtain write-in status in North Carolina for Cynthia McKinney. She was credited with 158 write-ins.

California AB 145, by Assemblyman Richard Pan, will not pass in the current legislative session. This is the bill to criminalize paying registration drive workers on a per-registration card basis. This is the second bill Pan has introduced this year on this subject. The first was AB 2058, which failed to pass several months ago in the Senate Public Safety Committee. AB 145 failed to pass the Assembly Rules Committee and it is now too late for bills that didn’t pass committees to be enacted.

The only feasible method for minor parties to obtain a place on the California ballot, or to remain on the ballot, is for such parties to have over 100,000 registered members. Making it more difficult for them to carry out registration drives would have been a serious blow to their efforts to get on, or remain on, the ballot.

On August 15, Matt Erard, the Socialist Party’s nominee for U.S. House, 13th district, filed a lawsuit against Michigan’s law on how newly-qualifying parties get on the ballot. Such parties this year need 32,261 signatures, yet older parties only needed 16,083 votes to remain on, for both 2010 and 2012. In Williams v Rhodes, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court said states cannot require newly-qualifying parties to show support from more voters than the support that is required for older parties to remain on the ballot. The case is Erard v Michigan Secretary of State, eastern district, U.S. District Court, 2:12-cv-13627.

Erard is a pro se litigant, so he can’t represent the Socialist Party; he can only represent himself.