Robert David Steele is a Virginian who is seeking the Reform Party presidential nomination. He recently investigated the Americans Elect nomination process, and he has written an interesting commentary about it. According to Steele, a high-placed official with Americans Elect says the Americans Elect web page will be revised by the end of January, to list all candidates who have expressed an interest in the Americans Elect presidential nomination.

Steele is a former civilian officer with the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence unit, and a former CIA case officer, and has written five books about intelligence gathering. He is a proponent of the open source intelligence movement. Here is the wiki article about him. His full name is somewhat ambiguous; sometimes he uses “Robert David Steele” and sometimes “Robert David Steele Vivas”, in the Latin American style that includes the mother’s maiden name as part of the surname.

On January 10, the attorney for the Alabama Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties mailed a complaint to the U.S. District Court in Alabama. The case is Stein v Chapman, number not assigned yet. The lawsuit challenges the March 13 petition deadline for new or previously unqualified parties. The statewide petition requires 44,829 valid signatures.

The 2011 session of the legislature moved the petition deadline from June to March. In 1991 the 11th circuit ruled that Alabama’s old ballot access law, which required 12,345 valid signatures by April, was unconstitutional because the deadline was too early.

On January 9, a U.S. District Court in Virginia ordered the State Board of Elections not to mail absentee ballots until the hearing in the ballot access lawsuit at the end of this week. See this story. The state filed an emergency appeal of that order with the Fourth Circuit.