On May 25, the Green Party and the Constitution Party filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Georgia’s procedure for placing newly-qualifying parties on the ballot for President. The case is Green Party of Georgia v State of Georgia and Brian Kemp, 1:12-cv-1822, northern district.
Georgia requires a petition of 50,334 valid signatures and requires each sheet to be notarized. No statewide petition for either a newly-qualifying party or a statewide independent candidate has succeeded in Georgia since 2000. In 1985 the 11th circuit ruled in Bergland v Harris that states must be more lenient on ballot access for president than for other office, and that Jenness v Fortson doesn’t necessarily apply to presidential candidate procedures. Georgia is in the 11th circuit.
There is now a constitutional ballot access case underway in all of the states with the worst ballot access procedures, except for Indiana and Texas. Cases are pending in Alabama, California, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. All of these cases are being handled by attorneys who are not charging for their services. The ballot access movement owes a huge debt of gratitude to these attorneys, who include Dan Johnson of Illinois, David Sapp of the Southern California ACLU, Mike Raffauf of Georgia, Roberta Price and David Urias of New Mexico, Gary Sinawski of New York, Bob Bastress of West Virginia, Jason Huber of North Carolina, Mark Brown of Ohio, Alan Woodruff of Tennessee, and Oliver Hall of Washington, D.C.
There are other constitutional ballot access pending in states not named above. The list above is not intended to be a complete list of such cases, but rather to highlight the cases against the most restrictive states. Six states are responsible for 60% of the total national number of signatures needed to place a new party or independent presidential candidate on the ballot in the entire nation (this calculation uses the easier method to get on the ballot in each state). Progress against those six states will do much to help voters of the entire United States. Those six states are California, Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Georgia, and Indiana.