On July 22, independent candidate Ieshuh Griffin filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee, over the state elections office refusal to print her partisan label on the November ballot.  She is running for Assembly, 10th district, and wants “Not the ‘whiteman’s bitch’ ” on the ballot.  The state elections office won’t print that.  The law says independent candidates can choose up to five words to describe their political principle.

The case is Griffin v Government Accountability Board, 10-cv-617.  It has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Randa.  Here is her Complaint.

On July 22, Mary Norwood, independent candidate for Chair of the Fulton County (Georgia) Commission, filed a lawsuit in state court in Atlanta.  The case is Norwood v Fulton  County Board of Registration and Elections, 2010-cv-188643.  A state law requires her to have paid her filing fee by noon on July 2, even though he petition was not due until July 13.  She did pay the fee on July 2, but at 4:40 p.m.  The lawsuit argues that substantial compliance should control this situation.

Meanwhile, county elections officials are checking her petition to see if she has the needed 22,500 (approximately) signatures.  She submitted approximately 33,000.

Georgia law has very few precedents on substantial compliance for independent candidate petitions.  The requirements are so difficult, it is rare for anyone to even try to get on the ballot as an independent candidate in Georgia.  No independent candidate petitions requiring as many as 22,000 valid signatures have succeeded in Georgia since Georgia first started requiring petitions for independent candidates in 1943, except for two independent presidential petitions, those of John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992.

Norwood had filed an earlier ballot access lawsuit on June 22, to validate her petition sheets in which the name “Fulton County” had been pre-printed on each signature line, so that the signer would not need to add this.  The judge in that case refused to rule either way, but later the Fulton County Election Board voted to accept those petition sheets.

Since the late 19th century, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws has been recommending model state laws on various topics.  The group has a great deal of prestige, and it is normal for state legislatures to accept the group’s recommendations.

The group has been working on a model state election law to prevent the perceived problem of faithless electors — that some presidential electors do not vote for the presidential candidate that carried that state in the November vote.  On July 21, it released this proposed text.  The text is not completely final.  Where brackets appear in the text, that means the particular state may want to substitute different language.  For example, some states put elections under a Secretary of State, but other states put elections under an Election Board, so each state must modify the recommendation to take measure of that detail.

If this proposed law were enacted, it would require each political party to submit twice as many candidates for presidential elector as that particular state has electoral votes.  Each candidate for presidential elector would have an alternate.  If that party’s slate won, and one of its electors voted for a presidential candidate other than the presidential candidate nominated by that party, then that elector would be deemed to have resigned, and he or she would be replaced by the alternate.

The proposed law does not deal with the problem that, on rare occasions, a candidate for presidential elector is nominated by two different parties, each of whom has its own separate presidential candidate.  For example, in 1948 in Tennessee, two candidates for presidential elector were nominated by both the Democratic Party, and also the States Rights Party.  The Democratic Party was running Harry Truman for President and the States Rights Party was running Strom Thurmond for President.  Both of these dually-nominated candidates for presidential elector were elected.  One of them voted for Truman in the electoral college, and one voted for Thurmond in the electoral college (prior to  the November election, both had publicly said they would vote for Thurmond).

If the proposed law were enacted in each state, unchanged from this text, it seems that states would no longer require independent presidential candidates to list their candidates for presidential elector on the petition to get the presidential candidate on the ballot.  That would be a big improvement for presidential candidates who must petition to get on the November ballot.  It would simplify the petition, and also solve the problem that sometimes candidates for presidential elector listed on a petition later decide they don’t want to serve in that capacity, which can create big problems for the petition.  Or, the need to list candidates for presidential elector delays the start of the petition, while the independent presidential candidate rounds up candidates for elector.  For example, in 1992, Ross Perot’s petition to get on the California ballot couldn’t start for a month after Perot announced, because it was not easy for the Perot campaign to choose who should have the honor of being listed on the petition as one of Perot’s electors.

The text says an independent presidential candidate should tell the state elections office the names of his or her presidential elector candidates.   The signers of the petition would not themselves be nominating the candidates for presidential elector, so logically their names would not be on the petition.