On April 10, the New Mexico Supreme Court put several Republican and Democratic candidates on the June 5 primary ballots. The Court decided the case only 33 minutes after hearing the oral argument. See this story. The ballot access of some candidates had been challenged because their primary petitions didn’t include the number of the district. A few more cases remain to be settled. The Court seemed to feel that substantial compliance with petition technicalities is good enough.
According to this story, Newt Gingrich qualified for the Utah Republican presidential primary in March, by paying a filing fee of $500. But the check bounded. The story says Utah elections officials will not remove Gingrich from the ballot, provided he pays the fee by April 20. The Utah presidential primaries are on June 26, the latest in the nation this year.
The same lenient treatment was given to Jesse Jackson in 1984, when his check to pay the West Virginia filing fee also bounced. West Virginia’s Secretary of State permitted Jackson to send a new check, and he did appear on the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary ballot. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
On April 10, Jerry Trudell filed his opening brief in the Vermont Supreme Court in Trudell v Markowitz. This is the lawsuit that challenges the petition deadline for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties. The 2009 session of the legislature moved the deadline from September to June. The primary is in August.
The lower Vermont state court had upheld the deadline, in a decision that did not even discuss the holding in Anderson v Celebrezze, the U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1983 that said early petition deadlines for independent candidates are unconstitutional. Instead the lower court based the decision on a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Storer v Brown, which did not even concern petition deadlines for independent candidates. Instead, Storer v Brown upheld a law saying no one could be an independent candidate if he or she had been a member of a qualified party during the preceding year.
The appeal in Trudell’s case was helped by the Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE), which helped raise money for the costs of preparing the transcript. Some of the readers of this blog helped with that fund appeal.
The 2009 legislature didn’t even carve out an exception for independent presidential candidates. Thus, the Green Party is severely disadvantaged in Vermont. It is not a ballot-qualified party, so it can only place its presidential nominee on the ballot by using the independent/minor party petition process. But the party won’t know who its national nominees will be until July 15, too late for the petition.
On April 10, the Missouri Senate Elections Committee unanimously passed HB 1236, the bill that improves ballot access for newly-qualifying parties. The bill had already passed the House. It fixes the typographical error that forces groups to list their candidates for presidential elector on their petition if they intend to run a presidential nominee that year. The error is bizarre, because such a group doesn’t need to list its candidates for other office on the petition.
On April 8, the Oregon Progressive Party state committee nominated Rocky Anderson for President. The party had nominated Ralph Nader for President in Oregon in 2008. Back then, the party’s name was the Peace Party, but it has since changed its name. Oregon, like many states, lets ballot-qualified parties change their names.
On April 10, Ralph Nader appeared at a press conference with Rocky Anderson, in Portland, Oregon. Nader said he supports the decision of the Oregon Progressive Party, and also said he supports Rocky Anderson for President. Nader does not endorse candidates, and did not use the verb “endorse” at the press conference. Nader feels that when someone endorses a candidate, that means the endorser agrees with all of that candidate’s positions. Nader feels that the verb “support” does not have that characteristic.
