Dean Roy, a fourteen-year-old, has completed his petition to be on the general election ballot as a candidate for Governor. He used the independent candidate petition procedure and his label is “Freedom and Unity”, according to this news story. Vermont is the only state that doesn’t set age qualifications to run for state office.
The California Secretary of State has posted copies of the income tax returns of all sixty-one gubernatorial candidates on her webpage. See the link here. Write-in candidates need not disclose their income tax returns, and in any event the deadline for write-in candidates to file is not until May.
Eight candidates filed an affidavit that they did not file income tax returns in any of the last five years.
No other state requires candidates for any elective office to have their tax returns made publicly available. In California, governor is the only such office. The law for presidential candidates was declared unconstitutional in both federal and state courts in 2019.
On March 26, a California state trial court refused to put Butch Ware back on the California primary ballot. Sacramento Superior Court, Ware v Weber, 26WM000074. An appeal is planned. The court order merely says that Ware’s request is denied “for the reasons stated in the oral argument”.
See this news story, which says that the judge skirted the issue of whether the tax returns law is unconstitutional. The law had been passed in 2019 and it covered presidential and gubernatorial candidates, but the part of the law relating to presidential candidates was struck down that year by both the State Supreme Court and a U.S. District Court Judge.
This article says that the Alabama Senate is not likely to pass HB 541, the bill to convert Alabama primaries from open to closed.
On March 25, the California State Appeals Court refused to put Che Ahn on the ballot as a gubernatorial candidate. Ahn v Superior Court, C105918. Ahn was kept off the ballot because he didn’t file his income tax returns for the last five years with the Secretary of State.
The Court did not explain its reasoning.
