On February 10, U.S. House member Joe Barton of Texas filed a brief with the 3-judge U.S. District Court in San Antonio that is hearing the redistricting lawsuit, advocating that the San Antonio court wait until the 3-judge U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. decides whether the legislature’s plan violates the Voting Rights Act.

Barton acknowledged that would delay redistricting quite a bit. His brief says, “Recognizing the interest of the statewide parties to conduct conventions, it is possible to bifurcate the presidential primary, if the Court so chooses. If the Court chooses to bifurcate the presidential primary, the other primaries could be held as late as the end of August. The presidential primary does not have a run-off election and programming andpreparing a single statewide ballot is relatively simple.” Thanks to TexasRedistricting blog for this news.

If Barton’s plan were to be adopted, one wonders what would happen to independent non-presidential candidate petition procedures. Texas says those petitions cannot be circulated until after the primary. Presumably, an independent candidate for office other than President would, under the Barton plan, not be allowed to start circulating until August, yet the state needs to print its ballots in early September.

Here is the map of Barton’s district as it was drawn after the 2000 census. It includes southeast Dallas and then a long swath of territory extending into rural areas that is barely attached to the Dallas part of the district. Barton was re-elected in 2010 with almost 70% of the vote.

February 10 at noon was the deadline for Indiana candidates running in a primary to file. The Indiana Secretary of State’s web page now lists five candidates who filed for the Republican presidential primary ballot: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Patricia Inez Sandifer, who lives in Indiana. She only submitted one signature, her own. However, under Indiana law, anyone who files a petition for a primary ballot, no matter how few signatures, is on the ballot unless the person is challenged and the challenge succeeds.

On the Democratic presidential primary, only President Obama filed.

The challenge period in Indiana is now open, and closes next week. It seems somewhat likely that Rick Santorum will be challenged, because according to elections officials in Marion County, he does not have as many as 500 valid signatures from the 7th U.S. House district. The law requires presidential primary petitions to have 4,500 signatures, with at least 500 from each U.S. House district.

No one can predict if Patricia Sandifer will be challenged. Indiana’s policy of leaving candidates on the ballot, even if they didn’t submit the raw number of signatures required (assuming they aren’t challenged), only applies to primaries. Indiana would not print the name of someone on the general election ballot as an independent or minor party candidate if that person’s petition lacked the required number of signatures, whether anyone challenged or not.

The only state that leaves people on the November ballot, regardless of how few signatures they have, if they are not challenged, is Illinois. In 2008, an independent presidential candidate, John Joseph Polachek, filed one signature to be on the November ballot in Illinois, and no one challenged him, so he remained on the ballot.

The challenge system is basically subversive of democratic values, because typically, candidates are not challenged if they are not perceived as threatening to anyone, but they are challenged if they have the potential to receive a high vote total. So the challenge system perversely often means that the less support a candidate has, the more likely he or she is to appear on the ballot, relative to a candidate who has substantial support.

On February 10, three Montana corporations asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let them make independent expenditures in the 2012 election. The case is American Tradition Partnership, Inc., v Attorney General of the State of Montana, no number assigned yet. Here is the document.

On December 30, 2011, the Montana Supreme Court had ruled 5-2 that Montana’s law, making it illegal for corporations to make independent expenditures supporting or opposing candidates for state office, is constitutional. This decision seems to contradict the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, issued in 2010, and of course the request to the U.S. Supreme Court points this out. The document to the U.S. Supreme Court is not only a request that the U.S. Supreme Court take the case, but that the Court also issue a stay of the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling while the case is under consideration. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news. UPDATE: the U.S. Supreme Court has already asked Montana to respond, and that response is due February 15, only five days from now. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the update.