The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, has this editorial. It recommends that the 180 or so Democrats and Republicans who were kept off their party’s primary ballots should submit petitions to qualify as independent candidates.
The editorial says the petition deadline is July 9, but actually, according to the law and the South Carolina Election Commission, it is July 16. The law says the deadline is July 15 but that is a Sunday, so the deadline becomes noon on July 16.
The Americans Elect web page has this statement, posted the morning of May 15. It says the organization will make a more important announcement in two days, about how it plans to proceed.
According to this news story, on May 14, the 3-judge U.S. District Court hearing Somers v South Carolina Election Commission orally ruled after the hearing that no relief can be granted to the candidates left off the June 12 primary ballot. Almost 200 candidates were kept off Democratic and Republican primary ballots (for state legislature and local partisan office) because of confusion over the deadline for filing a Statement of Economic Interests.
The story also says, at the bottom, that a group called “Operation Lost Vote” will help these candidates to collect signatures to get on the ballot as independents. The petitions are due in mid-July. They are very stringent, and require signatures equal to 5% of the number of registered voters (the law is much easier for statewide independents, and somewhat easier for independent candidates for U.S. House).
South Carolina has had very few independent candidates on its general election ballot. No one has ever qualified as an independent candidate for statewide office, other than President; and no one has ever qualified for U.S. House as an independent. Independent candidates appear on the November ballot with the label “By petition”, not “independent.” Over the years there have been qualified minor parties in South Carolina named the Independent Party, and anyone looking at old election returns might be deceived. True independent candidates are listed in the election returns as “petition” candidates, not “independent” candidates.
On March 20, New York state held a special election to fill the vacant State Senate seat in the 27th district, which is in Brooklyn. The only two candidates were David Storobin (nominated by the Republican and Conservative Parties) and Lew Fidler (nominated by the Democratic and Independence Parties). (Storobin also submitted a petition to be the nominee of the “School Choice” Party, but that petition failed).
Now that all the votes have been counted, Storobin leads by 27 votes. This is such a close margin that the votes will be re-tallied by hand. The previous count was by feeding paper ballots into an optical scan reader. See this story. The winner will only serve for the remainder of this calendar year. The district has essentially been eliminated for the 2012-2020 decade.
On May 14, the Virginia Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court over Virginia’s ban on out-of-state circulators. This is the third such case to be filed against Virginia on this issue in the last six months. The new case is Libertarian Party of Virginia and Darryl Bonner v Judd. Here is the eleven-page complaint.
The first such case was filed by Texas Governor Rick Perry. The U.S. District Court said the ban is almost certainly unconstitutional, but that Perry had filed the lawsuit too late (only 70 days before the presidential primary), so injunctive relief was denied. Before the case could get a ruling on declaratory relief, Perry and the other intervening presidential candidates dropped the lawsuit.
Then a new lawsuit was filed by a candidate for U.S. House in the June Democratic congressional primary. But then, after he filed the lawsuit, he was told he had enough valid signatures, even when the ones collected by a resident of the District of Columbia were set aside. So, he dropped his lawsuit.
